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.

RunKit: Instant, reproducible JavaScript playgrounds

I'm a huge proponent of the idea that programming tools should directly interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. RunKit is such a tool that offers a comprehensive JavaScript / Node.js prototyping environment. The service supplies you with instant, sandboxed Node.js instances called "notebooks" that allow you to experiment with the whole gamut of NPM modules. Moreover, "from graphs and maps to low level hexadecimal inspectors" RunKit offers data visualisations for immediate visual feedback. Once done you can showcase your ...

Exporting table data in web applications as CSV or Excel files

In business applications being able to export data to Microsoft Excel is a very common requirement. In most business environments Excel is the go-to tool for business analytics and quick-and-easy data processing. Hence, being able to communicate with Excel is an essential feature for most kinds of business software. The usual approach for meeting that requirement is generating a CSV file on the server. However, while simple this approach can come with a few downsides: While CSV is a useful, accessible plain text ...

Sunday January 29th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

The State Of JavaScript 2016: A Survey

A recent survey by Sacha Greif gives a comprehensive overview of the current state of the JavaScript world. Front-end, full-stack, testing, mobile: If you're working with JavaScript in any way this survey has you covered! It gives you a great overview of what's in use right now and what might be in the near future. The survey will be done annually. So, it should be possible to see where the JavaScript world is headed and which predictions turned out to be true by ...

Sunday November 13th, 2016 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Security Expert Mario Heiderich About AngularJS and Security

At beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf this year security expert Mario Heidrich gave a fast-paced - if sometimes too abrasive for my liking - talk about security and AngularJS: This talk contains a lot of useful insights as to what to pay attention to in order to secure your AngularJS applications (or in fact any web application created with a modern JavaScript framework), as well as techniques and approaches security consultants and hackers (both the white and black hat varieties) use in order ...

Sunday June 19th, 2016 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Jeremy Keith About Resilience In Web Applications @ beyond tellerrand 2016

At this year's beyond tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf web developer Jeremy Keith gave a talk on resilience in web applications: Resilience - Jeremy Keith - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. The World Wide Web - or the Internet for that matter - since its inception always was designed as a resilient, fault-tolerant medium. This not just applies in a technical sense but in a social or even political way, too. As John Gilmore is famously quoted: "The Net interprets censorship as ...

Sunday May 29th, 2016 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Advice On Improving JavaScript Test Speed (by Shyp Engineering)

On their blog engineers of logistics service Shyp (defunct) talk about how they improved the turn-around times of their JavaScript test suite by an order of magnitude of 3 (i.e. 1000x), which is no small achievement. In a modern software development process continuous integration and continuous deployment play a vital role. These ensure that your software always is in an deliverable, tested state and ideally is deployed to production systems in a timely manner when a change has been made. This process ...

Sunday January 31st, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Remy Sharp @ Fronteers 2015: The Art of Debugging

At the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam in October JavaScript specialist Remy Sharp talked about "The Art of Debugging" or rather his debugging workflow and useful best practices and approaches for debugging JavaScript and HTML5 apps. The talk contains lots of useful information on this complex subject. So, if you're developing JavaScript applications this presentation is very much worth watching: Remy Sharp - The Art of Debugging from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Sunday December 27th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software

FormatJS: Localize dates and numbers

Internationalization and localization still is a somewhat difficult problem in software development. FormatJS is a collection of JavaScript libraries that addresses a part of this problem by formatting dates and numbers according to a selected locale. It makes clever use of pluralization and natural language patterns so the output strings read like a natural language utterance instead of a computer-generated string, for example it generates these outputs for 0, 1 and 1,000 items, respectively: "Annie took no photos on December 14, 2014." "Annie took ...

Sunday December 28th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Impulse – Dynamic Physics Animations For The Mobile Web

Impulse is a promising new JavaScript animation framework for mobile websites. The animations generated with Impulse look very smooth and natural. Very impressive work. Go check out the examples page for a first glimpse.

Sunday October 26th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Superhero.js

Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic. Superhero.js is a useful and comprehensive list of articles about developing, testing and maintaining JavaScript applications. It deals with fundamentals of the JavaScript language, best practices and broaches subjects such as testing, tools and security. No matter if you're JavaScript ...

Sunday April 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.