Blog

Visualizing the progress of a refactoring into a hexagonal architecture using jQAssistant

In my last project, we decided to refactor the inner structure of one of our services into a Hexagonal Architecture. It was clear that this was no task that could be done within a couple of days. During this long-running refactoring, we wanted to make our progress visible. Where are we now? What did we already have achieved? What do we still have to do? In this blog post, I describe the approach we took and how it helped us with our task.

Cookie-based Spring Security Session

If you need authentication within your Spring Boot web application, the natural choice is to use Spring Security. It’s easy to use and, as long as you stick close to the defaults, it’s also quite easy to configure. But, by sticking to those defaults, you will automatically get a session that is persisted on the server-side. That’s a problem.

Does “Broken” Agility Help?

Why Broken Might Be Good Enough

Happy without a Service Mesh

It does not always have to be a service mesh. Even microservices are not a good idea per se. For good decisions we have to get a deep understanding of the problem first.

Domain-driven Design in the Large

If you know how to classify the concepts of DDD correctly, it will be easy to achieve good results - and there is a structured approach to achieve that!

Automating Dependency Updates with GitHub Actions

React: Lessons Learned

This article describes React from a backend programmers' perspective. It is not meant to be a tutorial, and it also does not present any new, fancy patterns or features. Rather, it is an interpretation of React with focus on shedding light on its functional aspects. Many experienced React developers appreciate the framework for being pragmatic, simple and easy to get work done with. This article unveils some of the theory behind this simplicity and shows how the core ideas behind the framework can be carried over to the lower levels of a Javascript application.

Injecting polyfills for missing JavaScript functions into WKWebView

Hybrid apps often use the WKWebView to display the web app part. Unfortunately there is no console output to being able to debug it. This blog post provides a guide on how to add polyfills to WKWebView with native code interaction. As a result you will be able to catch the console output of a webpage loaded in a WKWebView and print it to the Xcode debug console.

Integral Evolutionary Organizations

A way to organize a company without hierarchies with self management based on evolutionary purpose

INNOQcon Remote Edition 2020

Why two days of INNOQcon-remote edition have made my original dislike of online conferences vanish, why cyberspace is enriched by spatial audio and what advantages virtual events can still bring - a follow-up report.

Scraping a Docker Swarm service with Prometheus

Scraping a Docker swarm service from a Prometheus server that is outside the swarm is not as easy as it might look at a first glance. You have to fetch the metrics of all running service instances, but how to identify and access them?

Cross-platform testing of TypeScript code with Jasmine and Karma

Using Javascript plugins in Go

There are projects, where you want to create an application, that is extensible by other parties without access to the sources iteself or re-compiling the whole binary. This concept is known as modules, plugins or features nowadays. This might be the case if you are creating a client application (e.g. to implement scripting functionality), but also if you want to have your server application extensible by third parties.

Effectively Working from Home

For two years, we have been exclusively working from home. In this article, we provide tips on how to become productive working from home through appropriate hardware, software, methods, and communication techniques. And, we show how to stay motivated in the long term.

Remote work

Trust as a foundation for modern work

Requirements Engineering

The priority to invest into requirements engineering often suffers in everyday life, although its importance has been proofed to be the basis to develop values for customers. The objective of this article is to recall the core definitions and statements of requirements engineering and to provide aid with links for further readings on how to apply it in practice.

About unit and integration tests

The terms unit test and integration test are typically used as something different, or even opposite. In this blog post I explain why this is misleading and how I prefer to talk about isolation vs. integration instead.

Kubernetes Probes

How to use readiness, liveness, and startup probes

Command & Control, SAFe, Domain-driven Design, and Release Trains

Large complex projects are difficult to manage. Software release trains are one solution to coordinate such projects. But the approach is not a great fit for self-organization and modern management ideas.

Identification of quality requirements with Quality Storming

Quality Storming is a workshop for the identification of quality requirements based on a quality model, for example ISO 25010, using methods and ideas of Collaborative Modeling, which is popular in the Domain-driven Design Community. An important aspect in this context is a cross-collaboration of different stakeholders and skill sets.

Don’t tell me I’m not building a web application

So you want to compose some functions

Let’s say you have a list of functions and you want to compose them. Should be trivial, right? Of course it is, but maybe there’s an elegant way.

An Introduction to TypeScript

An ongoing architecture trend towards smaller services and faster, agile feature development gives developers some freedom to try out new languages and frameworks. TypeScript and Node seem to have a bad reputation amongst some backend developers although the language can be a perfect fit for many challenges in modern software development.

Traefik v2 and Mastodon, a wonderful couple!

A practical guide to setting up Mastodon behind Traefik v2 using docker-compose

JavaScript? Yes, but in moderation

The benefits of classic architecture decisions for web applications.