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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.

New Stratospheric Blog Post on Faster Amazon ECS Container Deployments

This week, we published a new Stratospheric blog post on how we achieved faster Amazon ECS Container deployments. So, if you're running containerized applications on AWS you might want to check this out. While that specific example uses the AWS CDK in its Java incarnation the general ideas and settings are generally applicable and therefore should easily translate to other languages and environments, too.
Sunday June 12th, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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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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RunKit: Instant, reproducible JavaScript playgrounds

I'm a huge proponent of the idea that programming tools should directly interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. RunKit is such a tool that offers a comprehensive JavaScript / Node.js prototyping environment. The service supplies you with instant, sandboxed Node.js instances called "notebooks" that allow you to experiment with the whole gamut of NPM modules. Moreover, "from graphs and maps to low level hexadecimal inspectors" RunKit offers data visualisations for immediate visual feedback. Once done you can showcase your ...
Sunday February 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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