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.

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 ...

Musings of a Greybeard on the State of Software Engineering

Two days ago software engineer and fellow blogger Tom Hombergs asked on Twitter if software development had grown harder over recent years, to which I replied: "Incoherent ramblings of a greybeard (without a beard, which is weird; these words rhyme, which is even weirder ...), who has seen at least 3 fat-client-thin-client cycles (the standard time unit in software architecture): As usual it depends. Just a few examples:" For the purpose of this blog post I just deemed it more sophisticated to call ...

July 19, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Repost from 16 June 2020: COVID-19 Tracing App for Germany

Repost from 16 June 2020: German COVID-19 tracing app available now.

June 28, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, General, Mobile Applications, Software

German COVID-19 Tracing App Available Now

Earlier today, the highly anticipated COVID-19 tracing app for Germany, called Corona-Warn-App, has been released. The iOS version is available on the App Store. The Android version can be downloaded at Google Play. The Corona-Warn-App is based on the DP3T (Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing) architecture and the joint specification by Apple and Google for privacy-preserving exposure notification, which implements this architecture as an API for official public health providers to draw upon. The app is developed and published as open source under the Apache ...

June 16, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, General, Mobile Applications, 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 ...

March 22, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Konrad Zuse: Not the most correct but the least complicated theories find practical application.

Not the most correct but the least complicated theories find practical application. - Konrad Zuse A translated quote from one of the inventors of computers and modern computer science I read last year under a bust of Zuse near Kleiner Tiergarten in Berlin this statement is more relevant today than ever. In software development in particular we often attempt to design solutions that cover each and every possible use case - however unlikely or even virtually non-existent that use case might be. ...

February 2, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Ana Cidre & Sherry List @ AngularConnect 2018: The good, the bad and the ugly – Component architecture at scale

April 28, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Manfred Steyer @ AngularConnect 2018: Architectures for huge Angular based enterprise applications

January 13, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, 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 ...

December 16, 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.

December 9, 2018 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.