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.

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 ...

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.

Sunday October 22nd, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software

Agile Med Dev: Software Testing for Medical Devices

Medical devices software engineer Julien Zaegel wrote an interesting series of articles on medical devices software testing. These articles provide an overview of as well as several useful insights on the specifics of testing medical devices software and software in general. When it comes to automated and manual software testing for medical devices there are several aspects you don't usually have to deal with when testing more common kinds of web or business applications: With medical systems human lives are at stake. Medical devices ...

Sunday October 15th, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

JHipster: Generate And Bootstrap CRUD Apps With Spring Boot And Angular

The previous two posts in my series on helpful tools for developing CRUD applications were about tools that addressed very specific problem areas: API format specifications and code generation from those specifications in particular. This post will be both less about APIs and solving specific CRUD-related problems but about a tool that deals with CRUD app requirements in a comprehensive manner. This tool I'm talking about is called - not so slightly tongue-in-cheek - JHipster. Both inspired by tried-and-true frameworks like Ruby on ...

Sunday September 17th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Swagger: A Roundtrip Tool For Creating And Consuming REST APIs

In this second part of my series on useful tools for developing CRUD applications I'd like to introduce Swagger and Swagger Codegen in particular. Introduce perhaps isn't exactly the right word because first of all Swagger is quite well known in developer circles these days. Secondly, a few months ago I wrote a blog post about how to use Swagger to generate client SDKs for REST APIs. Swagger - originally having originated at Wordnik is a tool for documenting and publishing their ...

Sunday September 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Annotate and validate data structures with JSON Schema

I'd like to begin my little series of useful tools for developing CRUD applications with JSON Schema: "JSON Schema is a vocabulary that allows you to annotate and validate JSON documents." JSON Schema gives you a straightforward way to provide type information and validation to existing data structures. Say, for example you have a product instance like this (converted from your language's native object or general data structure format using a tool like Jackson for Java): [code lang="js"] { "id": 1, ...

Sunday September 3rd, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Why Do We Still Write CRUD Applications?

Probably every software developer - since the 1990s at least - has been there once, asking him- or herself: "Why do I have to write tedious, repetitive CRUD code time and time again?" Being good, virtuous programmers some of those developers did what software development in the end mostly is about: They tried to automate a cumbersome, repetitive process that like any repetitive process should be performed by machines rather than humans. Some have succeeded - to some degree at least - ...

Sunday August 27th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

What Causes Over-engineering and How Can You Prevent It?

Last year software engineer Fagner Brack wrote an interesting and thoughtful article on "How To Accept Over-Engineering For What It Really Is" The article is very much worth the read in its entirety. There are a few key takeaways though I derived from it personally: I like the definition of over-engineering (quoted from Jeff Sternal) as "Code that solves problems you don’t have.". Fagner's conclusion is that what constitutes over-engineering depends on both context and the people involved. Over-engineering is usually brought about by unclear ...

Sunday April 16th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

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

Deploying Spring Boot applications as old-fashioned WAR files

Spring Boot is an opinionated convention-over-configuration framework for creating stand-alone Spring-based Java applications. Its objective is to provide you with a preselected best practice choice of libraries (both from the Spring platform and by third parties) for a given task, e.g. building a web application that connects to a database and provides REST resources creating a scheduled batch task that exports and aggregates data from various data sources providing an API that connects to SOAP Web Services It both helps you with getting started quickly and ...

Sunday February 5th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.