9elements Blog

Volatile downloads with Elixir and Phoenix

At some point, almost every product served by a web application needs a reporting functionality for its admins. This may be a page showing a graph and a table, or a spreadsheet download. — read more

10 July 2019 by Thomas Stratmann

Sizing Blocks or Areas using CSS Custom-Properties

One of the many challenges when it comes to writing CSS is choosing the right unit. Over the years there has been a lot of controversies whether to use px, em or rem — read more

17 June 2019 by Nils Binder

Track-switching in a large Elixir web application

We used a feature toggle to gradually re-build parts of the business logic of our app. We were then able to switch to the new logic, and seamlessly roll back to the old — read more

20 February 2019 by Thomas Stratmann

Maintaining large JavaScript applications

Lessons we have learned from maintaining large JavaScript applications in the long term. — read more

15 January 2019 by Mathias Schäfer

CSS Border-Radius Can Do That?

How to create very cool effects with a rarely used feature.TL/DR: When you use eight values specifying border-radius in CSS, you can create organic looking shapes. WOW. No time to read — read more

9 October 2018 by Nils Binder

Maintainable test setup with scenario pipelines

Shared test setup operating at the application level or below always made my test code hard to maintain. I stopped using test framework mechanics for this, in favor of concise repetitious setup pipelines — read more

4 October 2018 by Thomas Stratmann

Aus alt mach’ neu!

Als die-bewerbungsschreiber.de Anfang des Jahres auf uns zu kamen und mit uns die Neugestaltung ihrer Website planen wollten, wurde schnell klar - ein kompletter Rewrite birgt viele Risiken, da die Seite sehr — read more

25 September 2018 by Esther Stentenbach

Top 13 Websites to Learn How to Code in 2019

Don’t worry, I´ve got you covered. This article is about the best sites (mostly free) that teach you how to code. I have been a professional coder for several years now — read more

11 September 2018 by Christian Kienast

The 100 Ether Rooftop

Our story begins in July 2015, when the Ethereum project released the genesis block, the very first block of the ether blockchain. Some people in our team followed the idea of Ethereum for — read more

7 August 2018 by Eray Basar

Creating an animated SVG Neon light effect

We at 9elements organize an annual JavaScript conference called RuhrJS. The key visual shows a shaft tower and the conference name executed with a neon light effect. The main page features the full — read more

25 July 2018 by Nils Binder

On the Future of Web Development

Rust is a strongly typed, low-level programming language built for safety, speed, and concurrency from the ground up. It is mostly developed by Mozilla and has been battle tested by over a hundred — read more

11 July 2018 by Julian Laubstein

Building a responsive image

How to create a logo that responds to its own aspect ratioThere are quite a few articles on the web that deal with responsive logos. The most popular example might be the Responsive — read more

29 May 2018 by Nils Binder

First Facebook Developer Circle Ruhr

As we are determined to strengthen our local tech community with events like the RuhrJS conference and PottJS Meetups, we are always happy to embrace new chances to do so. We took the — read more

6 February 2018 by Melina Jacob

#tragmit - a Rails platform to give children a brighter future

#tragmit - Every child deserves a futureOur coders and tinkerers recently launched the new website for our client’s project #tragmit! (engl. #backit). The project aims to collect donations to support children with — read more

18 January 2018 by Melina Jacob

Kickoff of the Facebook Developer Circle Ruhr

9elements strives to bring local developers together. We successfully host the user group PottJS and the international conference RuhrJS in the Ruhr Area, but development is not all about JavaScript, right?What are — read more

22 December 2017 by Madeleine neumann

Streaming downloads in Elixir: a protocol love story

A tale about language features and HTTP streamingThis might sound familiar to you:You want to measure how well a product is doing and need some kind of reporting mechanism that provides you — read more

15 November 2017 by Thomas Stratmann

Elixir child specifications became a lot easier

and keep concerns separate along the wayThe official announcement of Elixir 1.5 was dominantly about improvements for debugging. Here I want to talk about a seemingly small change to how supervisor children — read more

2 November 2017 by Thomas Stratmann

Elixir & Phoenix, mp4 and the Safari

Learn how to serve mp4 files to the Safari browser.With Welect we have a client where we heavily rely on Elixir and Phoenix. Welect is a service you can use to access — read more

12 June 2017 by Daniel Hoelzgen

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 — read more

25 November 2016 by Jacob Dawid

Why we bet on Elixir and Phoenix

Elixir and Phoenix are promising to become a productive foundation for creating backend applications.While the software ecosystem is not yet on par with Rails, we think that this technology is on a — read more

26 October 2016 by Thomas Stratmann

Babel, Rails 5 and Sprockets 4 with Sprockets Commoner

For some of our Rails projects we have replaced the Rails Asset Pipeline with Webpack and we're quite happy with it.Webpack has so many nifty features and combining it with Babel we — read more

9 August 2016 by Sebastian Deutsch

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 — read more

3 August 2016 by Madeleine neumann

Install "Let’s Encrypt" with NGINX and Phusion Passenger

We all need more SSL! But installing SSL certificates is a big PITA. Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority (CA) offering free and automated SSL/TLS certificates.Certificates issued by Let’ — read more

14 April 2016 by Sebastian Deutsch

Changing versions of Elixir and Erlang

Version managers have been around in the ruby ecosystem for quite some time. You switch (cd) to a project using a different ruby version, and voilà, you are magically using the desired version — read more

19 January 2016 by Thomas Stratmann

Quit your fucking Job! - Why we need to rethink German Company Culture

Yeah, just quit it. Why? Because, most probably you can get a much better one! Let me explain this bold statement in some detail.Working as a software engineer, I had the chance — read more

18 December 2015 by Wojtek Gorecki

The 9elements Blog