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.

Remote Team Collaboration: Whiteboards With Google Jamboard

Two weeks ago I wrote about working collaboratively on digital whiteboards with Miro. Since 2017 Google has been selling competitively priced digital whiteboard hardware under its Jamboard brand. Alongside that hardware product, however, with Google Jamboard there's a companion software product of the same name as part of Google's G Suite collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools. Although Jamboard, the software, isn't widely promoted as an independent software product it works perfectly fine as a browser app without the Jamboard hardware. While not ...

Remote Team Collaboration: Appointment Scheduling With Calendly

Calendly is an online appointment scheduling tool that allows you, your team, or your entire organisation to flexibly schedule meetings. As a user you can define available time slots and allow others to schedule meetings according to these time slots. Calendly taps into your usual online calendar tool (e.g. Google Calendar, Office 365 / Outlook, or iCloud). Instead of the usual back and forth though that commonly happens when trying to agree on an exact time and date for an appointment Calendly ...

Sunday June 14th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Whiteboards With Miro

Miro is a collaborative whiteboard software that's ideal for exploring ideas and concepts in a distributed work setting. Much like a physical whiteboard it lends itself to ideation, brainstorming, design and planning sessions, i.e. work where the structure and nature of the outcome isn't necessarily known beforehand but rather freeform and loosely structured and the process by which these results are generated isn't particularly rigid. Miro provides the user with elements and tools such as sticky notes, freeform drawing, mind maps, grids, and ...

Sunday June 7th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Interactive Presentations With Mentimeter

Continuing on my recent theme of remote team collaboration tools, today I'd like to suggest Mentimeter. Mentimeter is an interactive online presentation tool that allows you to engage with and gather feedback from meeting attendees, workshop participants, or team mates. Where with ordinary presentation tools your captive audience can just watch and listen, Mentimenter enables event organisers to collect feedback, keep everyone engaged, and make sure everyone's voice is heard. In addition to the ordinary content slides one would expect from presentation software, ...

Sunday May 31st, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Presentify

In the last two weeks I wrote about Zappy and Loom - tools that help you with sharing information, documenting work and collaborating visually in remote or distributed work settings. Continuing with this general theme, today I'd like to suggest another, similar tool: Presentify (Mac App Store) is macOS menu bar app that allows you to annotate any screen or highlight your cursor, no matter the context or app you're in. This makes Presentify a general-purpose presentation and teaching tool that's ...

Sunday May 24th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Loom – Screen & Video Recording Software

Last week I wrote about Zappy by Zapier, a tool for visually documenting and sharing your work and your underlying processes. Loom is a similar tool that - by going beyond mere screenshots with actual screen recordings - allows your team to collaborate remotely and asynchronously. From explaining and reviewing code to design critiques, customer support, sales, and employee feedback there are a variety of use cases such a tool can you help you with when it comes to efficiently organising distributed work ...

Sunday May 17th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Communicate via Annotated Screenshots with Zappy for macOS

Zapier is a workflow automation software I'm using extensively and which I can highly recommend. Zapier is fully distributed remote company. In order to simplify collaborating visually while working remotely they have been using a tool called "Zappy for macOS" for some time now and they've recently released it for others to use as well. Zappy allows you to quickly capture, annotate, and share screenshots with your co-workers. In their own words, Zappy is: The fastest, all-in-one way to share screenshots, GIFs, and recordings with ...

Sunday May 10th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

The Richardson Maturity Model for REST APIs

On his website about software design patterns Martin Fowler provides an in-depth explanation of the Richardson Maturity Model for HTTP-based REST APIs by Leonard Richardson. According to that model REST APIs come in 4 levels of sophistication: Level 0, aka the "Everything is a POST request" model for example propagated by SOAP. This is basically tantamount to remote procedure invocation. Level 1 - Resources: Every resource is accessed through its own canonical URL. Level 2 - HTTP Verbs: Verbs such as GET, PUT, PATCH and ...

Sunday March 15th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

My Curated Collection of Angular Design Patterns, Best Practices, and Other Resources

This is my personal, non-exhaustive collection of Angular design patterns, best practices, and otherwise useful Angular resources: General Angular Coding Style Guide Angular Cheat Sheet Top 15 Angular INDEPTH articles of 2019 JSON Schema to TypeScript declarations: Keeping Client and Server Models in Sync with Spring Data REST and Typescript Angular ng-template, ng-container and ngTemplateOutlet - The Complete Guide To Angular Templates The Missing Introduction to Angular and Modern Design Patterns Custom Validators in Angular Testing Dependency Management for Angular Unit Tests Using TestModuleMetadata Using Page Objects with Protractor and Cucumber in ...

Sunday February 16th, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.