DeutschPosts Tagged: enterprise software
JSON Web Tokens: Downsides, Best Practices and Secure and Robust Alternatives
JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) nowadays are commonly used for transmitting authentication data in web applications, especially those exhibiting the widespread client-server architecture where you have a fat client / single-page application written in JavaScript as a front-end and a back-end server providing REST endpoints for use by that front-end client. However, while common there are good arguments against this practice. In a nutshell, JWT often are used for storing session data such user authorization and authentication information although they aren't particularly well-suited to ... Read more
Boring Solutions Revisited: Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley
Dan McKinley's article on choosing boring solutions, although not exactly new anymore, has been a welcome reminder for me to revisit the topic of of using boring solutions and keeping things simple. Dan makes the point that "adding technology to your company comes with a cost" or as I stated in my own article on this subject: "The elephant in the room is: There’s an opportunity cost to everything." Most choices come with a trade-off. If you decide to use a technology for the ... Read more
What’s Digitalisation Actually About?
Digitalisation, or digital transformation, as it is sometimes also called is an important subject matter as well as challenge for businesses today. Therefore, I find it strangely confusing that sometimes aspects are lumped together under this umbrella that are not or only tangentially related to what digitalisation actually is about. So, here's my - perhaps opinionated - take on what digitalisation is actually about and what it entails. In a nutshell, digitalisation comprises these aspects: Rethinking and being willing to change existing processes.
Making ... Read more
Reactive Programming with Spring Boot and Spring WebFlux
Reactive Programming and its functional incarnation reactive functional programming are declarative programming paradigms that with the advent of reactive extensions for JavaScript such as RxJS have become immensely popular. The JavaScript event loop and the run-to-completion behaviour it entails as well as Node.js's non-blocking I/O calls lend themselves to an event-driven programming style that deals with asynchronous behaviour where both number and frequency of events aren't known beforehand. Reactor is a library that introduces this paradigm to Java. Spring WebFlux is a ... Read more
State of JavaScript Survey: 2018 Edition – Criticism from an Angular Perspective
Recently, the results of the 2018 edition of the State of JavaScript survey have been published. As usual, the report comes with handy categories such as front-end, data layer, testing or mobile. While I very much support the idea of creating a yearly survey of the JavaScript landscape and this survey in particular, which I have been supporting since its inception, there's a major issue with this year's edition: In contrast to its previous editions the survey results lump together (or at least the ... Read more
Nonsense We Put up With: Complexity, Agile Gone Wrong and Enterprise Decision Making
Recently, I've come across a few articles that - although about ostensibly different subjects - share a common theme: When trying to create business value through software and devising the structures required to do so we all too often put up with wasteful processes, politics and toxic behaviour patterns that not only do not contribute to our goal but are downright detrimental. First, there's this transcript of a talk Martin Fowler gave at Agile Australia this year: The State of Agile Software ... Read more
Keep it simple, stupid
As something of a follow-up on my article on using boring solutions from two weeks ago I'd like to point you to a blog post by Justin Etheredge, cofounder of software development company Simple Thread: Software Complexity Is Killing Us In this post Justin outlines in which ways software development has become easier in the past few decades and also points out the ways in which it hasn't. Most of the complexity of software applications accumulates in the layer that deals with business processes. ... Read more
Use Boring Solutions
Often when working with both startups and project teams at larger, more seasoned companies I encounter a variation of the not invented here syndrome. This usually starts with the well-intentioned idea that in order to build the actual product you need ancillary services A, B and C in order for the product to work. However, more often than not instead of building the 'perfect' solution for your product yourself it might be a good idea to take a step back and think about ... Read more
Test-driven Development (TDD) with Angular 2 / 4
Recently, together with Jan Massenberg of Setlog I gave a talk on test-driven development (TDD) with Angular at the 2nd Angular Ruhr meetup. Currently, I help Setlog with improving their software quality and in particular with developing a SaaS tool that simplifies quality assurance processes (QA) in supply chain management. The talk was about hands-on experience with using TDD for implementing this SaaS tool. This article (sorry, German-only) summarises the key aspects of the talk and goes into some more detail regarding the various ... Read more
