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.

Five Articles on Software Quality and Design Patterns

This week I'd like to point you to five articles I previously posted on this blog and from which I think that they're as relevant as they were at the time. The first three are about general software design principles, software architecture and software quality while the final two refer to specific best practices and common design patterns for Angular: Writing Disposable Code, Not Reusable Code (November 06, 2016) What Causes Over-engineering and How Can You Prevent It? (April 16, 2017) Less Is More ...

The Mother of All Leaky Abstractions: The 500-mile Email

In last week's musings I complained about leaky abstraction on two counts, which reminded me of what in my opinion must be the mother of all leaky abstractions: The notorious 500-mile email. Impedance mismatches and TCP connections seeping through the cracks of the latest reactive programming frameworks certainly at times are difficult to deal with but the actual underlying transmission protocol of the relativistic universe shining through when trying to send an email? It can't get any better than that ...

Sunday July 26th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

Monoliths Aren’t Inherently Bad

Self-professed minimalist developer Kelsey Hightower a few months ago wrote about monoliths being the future. The microservice design pattern has been trending in software development for quite some now. Unfortunately, more often than not it's been indiscriminately treated as a panacea to every software architecture and design problem out there. Microservices can help with one aspect specifically: Reducing deployment risk. If you have a large monolith and frequently need to make changes to a specific part or feature provided by that monolith the whole ...

Sunday March 22nd, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, 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

Cloud Design Pattern Library by Microsoft

Microsoft maintains an extensive library of cloud design patterns. Whether you create applications that run on AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform, use platforms such as Heroku or you develop enterprise applications which run on on-premise cloud networks within a corporate intranet, cloud computing becomes ever more crucial to providing business value through software. Hence, it's not only expedient to know about the classic relatively low-level GoF design patterns or Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture but about design patterns for ...

Sunday December 16th, 2018 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

References to Design Pattern Libraries

When designing and developing software it's always useful to have a reference to common software design patterns handy. Apart from cloud design pattern libraries there are collections of more low-level or more general design patterns, too. These include the classic GoF design patterns and Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

Sunday December 9th, 2018 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

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

Design Patterns: Event Sourcing and Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

Event Sourcing and Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) are system design patterns that allow you to deal with event streams in a consistent manner. Common line-of-business applications typically are built using the MVC design pattern with the database tables representing the model tier in MVC as the single source of truth for the application state. Event-based systems are different - and inherently more complex - in that their single source of truth is the stream of events that led to the current ...

Sunday April 2nd, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Less Is More

What's true for design in general certainly is true for software design in particular: Less is more - or paraphrasing Dieter Rams - "Write less software in order to write better software." A few weeks ago I read this interesting article by web accessibility consultant Heydon Pickering. In this blog post he argues that the only foolproof way of writing performant web applications is to write less code. Sure, all that fancy minification, transpiling, JIT / AoT compilation and optimisation stuff might ...

Sunday October 2nd, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.