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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.

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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SCuri: Automating Unit Test Boilerplate Code for Angular Components

As I wrote about quite some time ago in this blog post, which details my solution for managing transitive dependencies for Angular unit tests . although Angular applications in general are easily testable and unit tests are first-class citizens with the framework itself, there's still some potential for improvement when in it comes to test maintainability. In particular, listing and referencing an Angular component's dependencies (i.e. the dependencies of the system under test) such as providers or imported modules can become tedious ...
Sunday January 9th, 2022 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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The Recent Log4j2 Vulnerability and How to Address it in Spring Boot Applications

By now, you probably will have heard about the Log4Shell 0-day exploit in Log4j 2 already. Since this is relevant to every Java developer and potentially every Java and hence - by extension - every Spring Boot application out there, I'd like to address this issue and how to mitigate it in Spring Boot applications. When using the default settings without any other dependencies, Spring Boot applications in general won't be vulnerable because Spring Boot uses Logback in its starter dependencies. However, if your ...
Sunday December 19th, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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Harry Roberts – Get Your “head” Straight @ beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2021

At this year's Düsseldorf edition of beyond tellerrand, Web Performance Consultant Harry Roberts gave this insightful talk on how to design and craft the oft-overlooked (no pun intended ...) HTML <head> element's content in terms of performance: Harry Roberts - Get Your "head" Straight - beyond tellerrand Düseldorf 2021 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.
Sunday December 12th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications
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