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.

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

Using Maven Failsafe With Spring Boot

Maven Failsafe is a Maven plugin designed to be used in conjunction with the Maven Surefire Plugin. While the former plugin is intended for running integration tests the latter's purpose is to run unit tests. These plugins are tremendously useful for partitioning tests in Maven-based Java applications in order to make tests and builds run faster. When recently using Maven Failsafe with a Spring Boot application, though, I encountered a somewhat gnarly problem. Running mvn verify caused this error for all of the ...

Sunday December 6th, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

The Laws of UX

For a discipline that's commonly seen as being mostly fuelled by creativity rather than being particularly rule-governed, principles, maxims, and laws seem to abound in the world of design. This perception of design being about creativity, first and foremost, rather than deliberate thought is a naïve and superficial one, though. Design of course has always been about principles and constraints, Dieter Rams' famous Ten principles for good design being a particularly good example. UX designer Jon Yablonski created Laws of UX, where he ...

Sunday November 29th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Tools for Working With CSS Grid Layouts and Flexbox

CSS Grid Layout and CSS Flexible Box Layout, commonly known as Flexbox, are powerful techniques for implementing flexible grid and column- or row-based layouts with CSS. These two techniques enable designers and web developers to accurately and fluidly position elements and content on web pages and web applications. While Flexbox (see A Complete Guide to Flexbox by CSS-Tricks) predominantly works along a single principal dimension, called the main axis or flex direction (either row or column), and therefore essentially is a one-dimensional ...

Sunday November 22nd, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Mock Data Generators for Tabular Data

Developing a JavaScript-based web front-end, e.g. with frameworks such as Angular, at some point - especially during the prototype phase - often requires working with data supplied by a back-end data source. Tools such as JSON Server enable you to spin up such a data source as a REST API server in no time with zero coding involved. However, running a back-end server is only part of the equation that is testing a front-end against actual data. Another vital ingredient is the data ...

Sunday November 15th, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.