my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Performing Effective Code Reviews – A Checklist

A few years ago, software architect Surender Reddy Gutha compiled a - still quite relevant - Code Review Checklist. All too often, when performing code reviews, we as software engineers tend to focus on minute details such as code formatting rather than the big picture, non-functional requirements, or architecture and security considerations. Perhaps, the problem already originates with the term code review: Rather than reviewing code we are - or should be - reviewing the resulting software and the impact code changes ...

Documenting REST APIs Provided by Express Applications

swagger-jsdoc is an NPM library that allows us to generate an OpenAPI specification for REST APIs provided by an Express application. swagger-jsdoc consumes YAML-formatted OpenAPI specification segments within JSDoc comments annotated with the @openapi annotation and turns those into a comprehensive OpenAPI specification for our API. This specification, in turn, can for example be used for automatically having a Swagger UI documentation page created for our REST APIs (using Swagger UI Express, for instance). While annotating Express routes with syntactically and semantically correct OpenAPI ...

Sunday March 13th, 2022 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

endoflife.date – Dataset with End-of-life Dates for Products

Recently, I came across endoflife.date, which is a quite useful database of product end-of-life dates. While it also includes hardware products (e.g., various iPhone models), its current main focus is software products, in particular those used in (enterprise) software development, such as Java, Spring, or Angular, or infrastructure and runtime environments like Docker or the Apache HTTP Server. A comprehensive, searchable collection of lifetimes for library and framework versions can come in handy when assessing - and potentially improving - the future ...

Sunday March 6th, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Clearing the Spring Security Context During Unit Testing

Last week I wrote about a minimal Spring Security Context setup for unit testing. I'd like to add just a tiny, yet depending on your use case perhaps quite important, tidbit to that: In case you need to reset a SecurityContext setup, e.g., a mocked user authentication, because, for instance, other test methods from the same unit test class verify behaviour for an unauthenticated application state and hence expect an anonymous user, you can clear the SecurityContext (for example, in your ...

Sunday February 27th, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Minimal Spring Security Context Setup for Unit Testing

Creating a minimal Spring Security setup for JUnit unit tests can be a tedious as well as somewhat daunting task. With its Authentication, Principal, GrantedAuthority, and UserDetails classes Spring Security is extremely flexible and configurable and probably accommodates pretty much every authentication and authorization use case under the sun. However, in software architecture such flexibility often comes at price, the trade-off in this case being that simple use cases can require more implementation effort than one would expect. One such use case ...

Sunday February 20th, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Optimising Docker Image Sizes: “Self-extracting” Node.js Applications

As a follow-up on last week's article on tools for inspecting Docker images, and Docker image sizes in particular, today I'd like to introduce another - more custom - approach for reducing the size of Docker images for production deployments. As a means of shaving off an additional 50 MB from the packaged application in question I came up with an idea somewhat reminiscent of the self-extracting archives of yore (of the WinRAR and 7-Zip flavours, for instance) for reducing the size ...

Sunday February 13th, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Tools for Inspecting Docker Images

Recently, I needed to inspect a Docker image in order to optimize its size for distribution and deployment on an ARM-based industrial microcontroller with rather tight bandwidth constraints. Once deployed at customer sites, these controllers typically don't have an Internet connection but still need to be updated occasionally, via the local network in that case. Since there's no guaranteed minimum network speed in this type of environment, yet software updates still have to complete within a relatively short period of time, optimizing ...

Sunday February 6th, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

In Favour of Keeping Changelogs

Closely related to the art of the README, keeping a changelog can be tremendously helpful when reviewing or contributing to an existing software project or when trying to decide whether to use a new tool. keep a changelog by software developer Olivier Lacan is a website that reminds us of the benefits a "curated, chronologically ordered list of notable changes for each version of a project" provides. Moreover, the website also lists useful guidelines and principles for creating changelogs as well as anti-patterns ...

Sunday January 30th, 2022 by Bjoern in Software

Stratospheric – 1.4 Released: Migration to AWS CDK v2 🏗

On Tuesday this week, we released another update of Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS, which includes these changes and updates: The AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) project, which we use to manage and deploy our AWS infrastructure, moves fast. Last year in December, AWS announced that the CDK v2 is now generally available. As one of our main goals for Stratospheric is to stay up-to-date with the latest tools and frameworks, we took the effort to update ...

Sunday January 23rd, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Revisiting More Popular Posts: Angular Development Environments & Analysing the Complexity of Angular Apps

Just a few weeks ago, I revisited two of the most popular posts on this blog. Continuing my blog housekeeping efforts, this time around I'd like to point you to two more blog posts that have been quite popular in recent years. If you're working on at least moderately complex Angular applications, these articles might be of interest to you: Running A Local Angular Development Environment Behind A Spring Cloud Gateway Service Analysing the Complexity of Angular Apps

Sunday January 16th, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.