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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.

Automating Processes: Meeting Notes

One of the key benefits of business software, or as a matter of fact, any software, is automation of tedious, repetitive tasks. One of the three great virtues of a programmer according to Perl creator Larry Wall is laziness as defined in: "The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many ... Read more

sdras/awesome-actions: A Curated List of Useful GitHub Actions

As a follow-up to last week's post on automating software maintenance tasks with GitHub Actions I'd like to point you to Awesome Actions, a curated list of resources related to GitHub Actions. The list includes both predefined actions you can directly use and resources for getting started with building your own actions and workflows, as well as various utilities for testing, linting and security purposes. Read more

Using GitHub Actions for Automating Angular Updates

I've published quite a few Angular applications under various open source (MIT and Apache License, respectively) licenses : GDPR Transparency PivotHelper TimeSheets3 Among other responsibilities, maintaining software comes with the task of regularly checking for dependency updates and applying them to the software in question. This first and foremost involves security updates but also bug fixes and new features for the frameworks and libraries used by the application. Fortunately, Angular CLI comes with a command that allows you to do just that: [crayon-66060cf446080047458043/] However, while having a simple ... Read more

Fetching Incoming Invoices in an Automated Fashion With Puppeteer

Like I said in 2016, accounting is still a manual and tedious process. However, since then I've made quite some headway, especially with regard to automatically fetching and storing incoming invoices. By now, all of those thankfully arrive via email, which allows me to have Zapier automatically fetch them and store attached invoice PDFs in the appropriate folders in Google Drive. One particular, lasting pet peeve of mine in that respect, however, so far has been German railway company Deutsche Bahn AG and ... Read more

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 ... Read more