The 9elements Blog

Our company's top wizards, stuntmen, and industry experts offer their best advice, how-tos, and insights - all in the name of shockingly good code & design.

My Thoughts on CSS Day 2023

Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to attend my first CSS Day in Amsterdam. It was an exceptional experience that left me brimming with newfound knowledge. While I felt confident about certain topics, such as the has-selector and container...

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Ethereum 2.0

We have always been big fans of Ethereum, and we've been on the lucky side to have invested into this idea early on. When the second big bubble of crypto was about to pop,  disillusionment and doubts lured behind the corner: The technology that was...

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Building a responsive image

How to create a logo that responds to its own aspect ratio There are quite a few articles on the web that deal with responsive logos. The most popular example might be the Responsive Logos website that shows some very well known logos in different...

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Ethereum - The world computer

A lot of people might have heard of Ethereum, the new blockchain technology coming up as a successor to the bitcoin cryptocurrency. Although widely celebrated as the next big thing, the reaction to being stressed by the DAO hacker(s) recently and an...

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Retrospect RuhrJS

Let’s wind back the clock for one and a half years. I just started my new job at 9elements and at that time I would have never give thought to organizing a conference. But soon after I became a part of 9elements I took over the responsibility for the...

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The ethereal Frontier

Some of you may have heard of the new big thing - You may have heard that Ethereum's co-founder Vitalik Buterin was awarded with $100k within the Peter Thiel fellowship programme. That Ethereum which pre-sold it’s cryptocurrency, the Ether, last year...

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German Valley Week Review

I just returned from my German Valley Week trip to San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. German Valley Week is an organized trip where entrepeneurs, investors and politicians from Germany visit disrupting startups ranging from new ones like Uber or...

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Go in Production

Some of our projects are gaining traction lately. That’s why we need to scale some parts of the infrastructure. 9elements started the search for a language that gives us more performance but that’s also expressive and easy to write. Since Go is used...

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New project: OECD Data Portal

In July, we have launched a new client site, the OECD Data Portal. The OECD is an international organization that analyses national economies to coordinate the policies of its member states. The OECD conducts well-known studies like PISA and...

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Our First Experience with Swift

Every other month or so we like to do a small Hackathon at 9elements. Last week, after months of hard client work, we finally had the chance to have one again. During the two-day long event, several teams gather to explore new technologies,...

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Visual storytelling using WebGL

Recently we were working on a redesign of the uformit website. Uformit, an online marketplace for personalized 3D design, was already presented at the 3D Printshow in London and New York, but never announced to the public. It features a WebGL powered...

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Stripe vs. Paymill

As you might know 9elements is specialized in building digital products. One of the tasks that comes with almost every product is payments - after all you want to earn some money. When it comes to payments there are plenty of options out there and...

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CocoaPods Best Practices

CocoaPods is a relatively new way to manage Xcode library dependencies like the Facebook iOS SDK et al. If you are coming from the Ruby world you know this kind of workflow from bundler. CocoaPods can be easily installed as a gem via ‘gem install...

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The digital carpenter.

Two years ago, Martin, author of the following post, was about to become a carpenter. Instead, he became our apprentice and a fellow webdeveloper. Needless to say how drastically this changed his perspectives. It was not an easy decision to take...

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Live is beautiful.

At Nodecamp 2011, we wanted to present a live tracker built with Node.js. After seeing the popular facebook map by Paul Butler, I was wondering why not create something like that with live data. The appeal of watching the temporal dynamics within...

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Facebook's watching you, brother.

There is a potential side-effect of the new facebook "like" button, which has currently not reached public awareness, but it probably should. It starts when you leave the facebook website. I usually don’t log out, my friends don’t log out, and in...

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The most epic tech-battles in 2010

So we've seen a couple of 2010 lists lately, but from a technical perspective, we think they were missing some important stuff. The following list is a snapshot of heated-up discussions in our company about things that could shake up the web...

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Integrating Captchas with Django

Why do I need CAPTCHAs? As soon as your web project becomes bigger you will notice that bots are trying to spam your blog and to fake user inputs. When I created a blog with Django for a website with about 60.000 unique users per day I had to delete...

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HTML5 Canvas Experiment

Click here to launch the experiment! (beware: sophisticated browser needed) HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of FireFox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new betas of Google Chrome and Opera, browsers support some great new features...

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