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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.

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 ... Read more

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 ... Read more

Don’t Just Document Software, Tell a Story.

Humans tend to remember stories much better than mere facts, which probably is why storytelling has such a long tradition in human history. Storyteller is - quoting from their own description - an "editor plugin that generates web pages that recreate and animate entire programming sessions" (see this playback repository for examples and the project's GitHub repository for more details). It's an interesting, novel take on software documentation in that instead of merely describing some current state of code and what it's supposed ... Read more

Humanising Your Documentation – Carolyn Stransky @ beyond tellerrand 2019

Humanising Your Documentation - Carolyn Stransky from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. Read more

Dinero.js: Working With Monetary Values in JavaScript

Working with monetary values can become a problem in any programming language and JavaScript certainly is no different in that respect. The naïve assumption that monetary values can be expressed as floating point numbers almost inevitably leads to rounding errors caused by precision and the fact that in most cases monetary values are represented as decimal numbers with just two (instead of an undefined number of) decimal places. Apart from that, money is not just a number but usually comprises a currency ... Read more

Blogumentation

I'm not sure if he actually came up with the term 'blogumentation' but software quality engineer Jamie Tanna features quite prominently when searching for it so at the very least he appears to be one of its more avid and deliberate users. Anyway, while the term 'blogumentation' might be somewhat obscure the concept behind this particular portmanteau is a seminal one. Basically, it derives from the insight that often the best way to learn and internalise knowledge is to talk, write and ... Read more

Using Swagger to Generate Client SDKs for REST APIs

These days Swagger is a popular, easy-to-use tool for (semi-)automatically documenting REST APIs on-the-fly. For example, in order to document a REST API created with Spring Boot and Jersey literally all you have to do is add these two entries to your Maven pom.xml: [xml] <dependency> <groupid>io.springfox</groupid> <artifactid>springfox-swagger2</artifactid> <version>2.6.1</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupid>io.springfox</groupid> <artifactid>springfox-swagger-ui</artifactid> <version>2.6.1</version> </dependency> [/xml] You'll then get a ready-made documentation for all your REST API endpoints. An example of how this looks like can be seen here. While this already is very useful in that it helps with properly documenting your software, especially ... Read more

Documentation and Spreadsheets with an API: GitBook and Fieldbook

Continuing on last week's post about RunKit - a Node.js prototyping environment for the browser - here are two interesting tools that make use of RunKit: GitBook is a collaborative documentation tool that allows you to create beautiful, version-controlled documentation for your software. It's used by software components like Redux and it leverages RunKit to embed live, reactive code examples in your documentation. Fieldbook is was a database creation tool thats touted as "A database with an API – as simple as a ... Read more
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