software development | Björn Wilmsmann

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.

German COVID-19 Tracing App Available Now

Earlier today, the highly anticipated COVID-19 tracing app for Germany, called Corona-Warn-App, has been released. The iOS version is available on the App Store. The Android version can be downloaded at Google Play. The Corona-Warn-App is based on the DP3T (Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing) architecture and the joint specification by Apple and Google for privacy-preserving exposure notification, which implements this architecture as an API for official public health providers to draw upon. The app is developed and published as open source under the Apache ...

Debugging for Mobile Browsers

Occasionally, web developers need to debug a web app's behaviour in a specific browser on a specific device or class of devices. For desktop devices this usually isn't a problem because every modern browser nowadays provides a console, where application errors and custom console.log statements pile up. However, on mobile browsers there's usually no browser console, or browser development tools, for that matter. Analysing browser logs is still possible via vendors' development tools like Apple's Xcode, for example. Still, that process often ...

Sunday May 3rd, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

Improving Developer UX

Software engineer and data scientist Gabriel Pickard recently has published an article about developer experience being fundamentally harder than normal UX. He defines developer experience as the user experience of the tools software developers use in order to do their job: code editors IDEs command-line tools Gabriel identifies these main aspects in which in his opinion developer tools are failing their users: Counter to any UI/UX philosophy, as programmers we find ourselves maintaining vast background knowledge about the structure and dynamics of our programs, with nary a ...

Sunday April 26th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Alternative Git Workflows

In his 2018 article "4 branching workflows for Git" software developer Patrick Porto outlines these four proven Git workflows and their respective advantages and downsides: Git Flow GitHub flow GitLab Flow OneFlow While Git Flow probably is the most well-known and most widely used one of those it's also received quite some criticism for being overly complex. Even Git Flow originator Vincent Driessen, has only just recently noted that when he originally conceived of this workflow more than 10 years ago he had explicitly versioned software packages ...

Sunday April 5th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

No-code, Low-code, Some Code and Everything In-between

CTO-for-hire (through Freeman Clarke) Alex Hudson recently wrote an article about what he terms "The 'No Code' Delusion": That so-called no-code and low-code tools will replace bespoke business software development entirely, no trained software developers required anymore. In a nutshell, it's the old pipe dream of just having to write a specification (in this case a visual one) and having the actual code write itself, the fallacy here of course being that the code is the final product rather than the specification ...

Sunday March 1st, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

API Security Best Practices by Expedited Security

For everyone dealing with web-based APIs, both as a provider and a consumer, web app security service supplier Expedited Security (known for Expedited SSL, among other products) has compiled a vast, extensive compendium on API security best practices. The importance of secure APIs and best practices that help has make APIs more secure and dependable can't be emphasised enough. Covering each possible attack vector and adopting every best practice out there can seem like a truly daunting task. Guides like this one help ...

Sunday February 9th, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Konrad Zuse: Not the most correct but the least complicated theories find practical application.

Not the most correct but the least complicated theories find practical application. - Konrad Zuse A translated quote from one of the inventors of computers and modern computer science I read last year under a bust of Zuse near Kleiner Tiergarten in Berlin this statement is more relevant today than ever. In software development in particular we often attempt to design solutions that cover each and every possible use case - however unlikely or even virtually non-existent that use case might be. ...

Sunday February 2nd, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Jess Frazelle: “For the Love of Pipes”

Somewhat recently, Jess Frazelle wrote about her love of UNIX pipes, a sentiment I wholeheartedly share, to the extent that I think web apps should behave more like Unix programs by making data readily available via APIs so other applications can easily process that data. This, in a nutshell, is the Unix philosophy as stated by Doug McIlroy: Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features". Expect the output ...

Sunday October 6th, 2019 by Bjoern in Software

“Paging with Spring Boot” by Tom Hombergs: A Guide to Paging and Pagination in Spring-based Web Applications

In his article Paging with Spring Boot software engineer Tom Hombergs (a former fellow student) provides an in-depth explanation of paging and pagination concepts and how to implement those in web applications with Spring Data and its Pageable interface. The article covers aspects such as sorting, usage with Spring Data repositories and testing. It's a useful reference for iteratively retrieving and displaying a larger amount of items from a database in a Spring Boot and Spring Data context in an efficient manner. There's ...

Sunday July 7th, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

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