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.

My Remote Work Setup

I've been a proponent of remote work, new ways of work and different approaches to work culture and the opportunities and options those provide for a long time. While 2019 arguably was the year when remote work finally caught on for more than just a select few, 2020 most definitely was the year when remote work really took off - for obvious reasons. I'd like to quickly share some of the tools and components from my current setup, in terms of both specific ...

Material-UI Builder: Generating a React / Material-UI Codebase

Material-UI is a widely used UI component framework for React based on Google's Material Design design system. These frameworks and systems simplify and streamline the development of consistent user interfaces for web applications. Material-UI Builder is drag & drop online editor that allows you to choose from a wide range of Material-UI components for your application, customise the CSS styles applied to them, and export a ready-to-use codebase based on those preferences.

Sunday February 7th, 2021 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Big O Notation Explained

Conrad Reeves recently published an article on Big O notation on That Computer Scientist, in which he tries to explain this - seemingly daunting - subject as easily as possible. Big O notation is a method for ranking an algorithm's efficiency in terms of time (e.g. CPU cycles) or space (i.e. storage or memory) requirements. In a nutshell, Big O notation allows you to make rough approximations like for example: "In a best case scenario the algorithm in question at most will ...

Sunday January 31st, 2021 by Bjoern in Software

Five Articles on Software Quality and Design Patterns

This week I'd like to point you to five articles I previously posted on this blog and from which I think that they're as relevant as they were at the time. The first three are about general software design principles, software architecture and software quality while the final two refer to specific best practices and common design patterns for Angular: Writing Disposable Code, Not Reusable Code (November 06, 2016) What Causes Over-engineering and How Can You Prevent It? (April 16, 2017) Less Is More ...

Sunday January 24th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Image Compression Utility: Squoosh

When working with images on web applications and websites optimising images and reducing their download size is a quick win in terms of optimising page and app load times. There are plenty of image compression utilities out there - both web apps and tools for local installation. Recently, I've tried out several of those again because I wanted to reduce the overall load time of this website and according to website audit tools such as Lighthouse image sizes definitely was an area ...

Sunday January 17th, 2021 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications

Managing Permissions with IAM – Sample From “Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS”

The following is an excerpt from the chapter on "Managing Permissions with IAM" from the eBook "Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS" I'm currently writing together with Tom Hombergs and Philip Riecks. You can get the eBook over at Leanpub. Managing Permissions with IAM When deploying applications to a cloud service such as AWS, reliable security concepts are key. After all, we not only want to protect our users' data but also make sure that security within our organization ...

Sunday January 10th, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Second Version of Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS

Two weeks ago, we released the second version of our eBook "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS". This release contains these new chapters on IAM, local development, and automated deployments: Managing Permissions with IAM - this chapter gives an overview of the concepts we can use with AWS in order to secure our resources and to authorize both individuals and applications to access them. Local Development Setup - this chapter explains how we can develop our cloud-based Todo application ...

Sunday January 3rd, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

2020 in Live Gigs

I'm an avid music fan and concert-goer. As mentioned in last week's post I'd like to write a bit about live music events in 2020. For obvious reasons, 2020 has both been a very different and a very difficult year for live events and those that make a living from them: Artists and performers, speakers, conferences, festival, venues, sound engineers, sound and lighting technicians, caterers, stage hands. These were the only bands I was able to see during on-location live music shows ...

Sunday December 27th, 2020 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Music

2020 in Review

May you live in interesting times. - claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse - Usually I refrain from writing one of those end-of-the-year reviews because they often amount to little more than self-involved navel-gazing (been there, done that ...). However, 2020 was a truly interesting, extraordinary and in many ways remarkable year. So, here goes, navel-gazing and all ... In December 2019 (or thereabouts) what we today know as COVID-19 or the Coronavirus pandemic started to spread causing a global crisis ...

Sunday December 20th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, General

Latency by The Radiophonic Workshop

On the 22nd of November, the electronic music pioneers of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop (of "Doctor Who" theme music fame, amongst others) performed a unique piece of music called 'Latency', in which they make clever use of network latency to create a musical loop. Each of the musicians involved sequentially played his part in a loop. The result then was sent via the Internet to the next musician at another location, who in turn built upon what had been played until ...

Sunday December 13th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Music, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.