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.

sdras/awesome-actions: A Curated List of Useful GitHub Actions

As a follow-up to last week's post on automating software maintenance tasks with GitHub Actions I'd like to point you to Awesome Actions, a curated list of resources related to GitHub Actions. The list includes both predefined actions you can directly use and resources for getting started with building your own actions and workflows, as well as various utilities for testing, linting and security purposes.

Using GitHub Actions for Automating Angular Updates

I've published quite a few Angular applications under various open source (MIT and Apache License, respectively) licenses : GDPR Transparency PivotHelper TimeSheets3 Among other responsibilities, maintaining software comes with the task of regularly checking for dependency updates and applying them to the software in question. This first and foremost involves security updates but also bug fixes and new features for the frameworks and libraries used by the application. Fortunately, Angular CLI comes with a command that allows you to do just that: [crayon-6937c8c7c96aa560845513/] However, while having a simple ...

Sunday August 16th, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software

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 ...

Sunday July 26th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

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 ...

Sunday July 19th, 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.

Sunday June 28th, 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 ...

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

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 ...

Sunday March 29th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

My name is BjÃ¶rn …

Looks like my name's broken. Perhaps next time I'll check in under a non-Unicode, strictly ASCII charset one. Does that count as a @KevlinHenney? — Björn Wilmsmann (@bwilmsmann) October 2, 2019 https://twitter.com/bwilmsmann/status/1179428788708560896

Sunday March 8th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

In-depth Description of Medical Devices Software Testing

In this blog post series medical devices software developer Julien Zaegel describes the process of testing software for medical devices, including automated tests, supervised tests and manual tests. Julien provides a detailed view on how quality assurance for software for medical devices works in order to ensure the safety and reliability required for devices of literally vital importance, as well as of course legal and regulatory compliance. He not only explains the various test processes, practices, categories of tests and different levels of ...

Sunday February 23rd, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

My Curated Collection of Angular Design Patterns, Best Practices, and Other Resources

This is my personal, non-exhaustive collection of Angular design patterns, best practices, and otherwise useful Angular resources: General Angular Coding Style Guide Angular Cheat Sheet Top 15 Angular INDEPTH articles of 2019 JSON Schema to TypeScript declarations: Keeping Client and Server Models in Sync with Spring Data REST and Typescript Angular ng-template, ng-container and ngTemplateOutlet - The Complete Guide To Angular Templates The Missing Introduction to Angular and Modern Design Patterns Custom Validators in Angular Testing Dependency Management for Angular Unit Tests Using TestModuleMetadata Using Page Objects with Protractor and Cucumber in ...

Sunday February 16th, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications