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.

Anjana Vakil @ RuhrJS 2017 – Immutable Data Structures for Functional JS

At RuhrJS 2017 Anjana Vakil gave a fascinating talk on immutable data structures for use with functional programming. This talk involves some great educational storytelling. Even if you've never had a computer science course on data structures and never entirely understood things like hashes, trees or tries, after having watched this talk you will!
Sunday January 14th, 2018 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Paul Verbeek-Mas @ RuhrJS 2017 – Calendar / Kalender / تقويم (aka, the fun of locali[zs]ation)

At RuhrJS 2017 Paul Verbeek-Mas gave an interesting talk on the joys and intricacies of i18n and l10n with regard to how time, dates and calendars are rendered in web apps:
Sunday January 7th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Opinionated List of Essential WordPress Plugins

I have an personal, opinionated list of essential plugins that should be installed in every new WordPress instance for various purposes, a few of which are: security maintenance performance search engine optimisation (SEO) legal compliance So, without further ado here's my list of essential WordPress plugins: Advanced Automatic Updates Akismet Anti-Spam All In One SEO Pack Autoptimize BackWPup EU Cookie Law Google Authenticator Google XML Sitemaps Leverage Browser Caching Limit Login Attempts Social Media Auto Publish Wordfence Security WP Super Cache
Sunday December 31st, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software, Web
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Rachel Andrew @ RuhrJS 2017: Start Using CSS Grid Layout Today

As the obligatory CSS person at a JavaScript conference, at RuhrJS 2017 CSS expert Rachel Andrew gave a talk on CSS grid layouts and how they differ from flexbox layouts:
Sunday December 17th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Sara Harkousse @ RuhrJS 2017 – Web Components: It’s all rainbows and unicorns! Is it?

At RuhrJS 2017 Sara Harkousse gave a talk on web components and custom elements in particular. In this talk she gives a hands-on introduction on how to get started with custom elements:
Sunday December 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Paying for Developer Tools

Recently, a user named amerkhalid wrote this on Hacker News (commenting on a question about the market for developer tools): Agreed. Developers are hard bunch to sell to. We go out of our way to find free tools and almost look down on people who use decent IDEs or other tools. One example, when I finally got legit license for Sublime Text, all of my friends made fun of me for paying for a free software. I replied by criticising this attitude (that ...
Sunday December 3rd, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software
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12 Factors for Building Quality Web Applications

When considering the different aspects that potentially contribute to (or detract from, mark you ...) quality, reliability and maintainability of a web application I always like to come back to the Twelve-Factor App. Originally created by Adam Wiggins in 2011 the Twelve-Factor App is a highly useful design framework for both creating new web apps and measuring and improving the quality of existing applications. This framework allows you to create and maintain long-term viable applications that make use of declarative formats, clearly ...
Sunday November 26th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications
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Microservices and Decoupling Front-end Components

Microservices have become a common design pattern for splitting up and modularising monolithic applications. The indiscriminate application of this particular design pattern is quite a bit worrying, though. A few months ago I gave this answer to the question what the biggest struggle with Microservices is: Convincing people that microservices are not a cure-all but just another design pattern. You have to start out with a monolith and only if you realise along the way that some components might work better as a ...
Sunday November 19th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Web Apps and Websites: Documents and Applications

Today, when starting development of a new website using a pattern that just a few years ago used to be called single-page application (SPA) not only seems to be the new default but even like the only way of creating stuff for the web. Clearly though not all content for the web is created equal: On one side of the spectrum we have (mostly) static documents identified by URIs and returned by URLs. Most websites that simply provide content (news sites for ...
Sunday November 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications
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