The 9elements Blog

More productive through less bullshit

Corporate growth kills individuality – or at least it tries to. We found, at least for us, an approach to combat the slow death of our company culture while growing from a living-room-like office with a few team members to a global player with over 80 employees and the founding of several start-ups.   —  read more

7 June 2021 by Joshua Schmitz

Testing Angular applications

Angular is an excellent framework for building enterprise-grad JavaScript single-page applications. How do take advantage of Angular’s testability?   —  read more

5 May 2021 by Mathias Schäfer

Digital Agency goes Beauty - Produkt- und Shop-Design für J'Tanicals

Als sehr technisch angesehene Agentur mit vielen Projekten und Partnern im IT-Bereich, ist es oft schwer, sich in anderen Branchen zu behaupten.   —  read more

26 April 2021 by Joshua Schmitz

Maintaining JavaScript applications in the long term

How we enhanced and refactored a client project over six years   —  read more

11 January 2021 by Mathias Schäfer

The Devil's Albatross

Learn how to build an algorithmic layout that switches from two centered elements to a spaced-out flex layout.   —  read more

4 January 2021 by Nils Binder

Telegram Service for Ethereum 2.0 Staking

On the 1st of December, the first phase of the Ethereum 2.0 transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake will start - and we're happy to be part of the   —  read more

30 November 2020 by Sebastian Deutsch

Developing on Windows with WSL2

Last week the keyboard of my MacBook Pro broke. One key just stopped working, and I have lived over months with double keystrokes. It was time to bring it to the Apple store   —  read more

18 August 2020 by Sebastian Deutsch

Gradient angles in CSS, Figma & Sketch

Do you know the feeling when a subject never lets you go? In the last years, I have worked with different graphics programs and have written many lines of CSS. Even though it   —  read more

10 August 2020 by Nils Binder

GPT-3 might be the iPhone moment for AI

GPT-3 is a transformer neural net topology that can be used for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. It is an unsupervised learning approach with the core idea that if you feed the net   —  read more

22 July 2020 by Sebastian Deutsch

What We Learned From Going 100% Remote As A Digital Agency

"So, how's the remote working thing going for you?" Right about now I get this question a lot, not only from other team members, but from friends and family struggling with working from   —  read more

5 May 2020 by Julian Treutler

Create Diagonal Layouts Like It's 2020

Layouts with diagonal sections are quite popular for several years now. You will probably not find it in the articles titled "Design trends for 2020". But I think it is here to stay. It is one tool designers can use to bring some dynamic to all the rectangular boxes with boring 90-degree angles.   —  read more

19 February 2020 by Nils Binder

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   —  read more

14 February 2020 by Sebastian Deutsch

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