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 genesis. We followed this guide to set up a lighthouse client (we love Rust) developed...
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 and get it fixed. The dude in the Genius Bar told me it would take 10-14...
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 enough text, it eventually will be able to find patterns. It...
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...
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 can write next generation JavaScript today. But sometimes,...
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’s Encrypt are trusted by most browsers in production...
This week, the World Economic Forum launched “The Inclusive Growth and Development Report 2015” with combined forces of 9elements and the help of our friends. The report, which covers 112 economies, seeks to improve our understanding of how countries...
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...
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...
Adding dependencies to your project can often be very painful, because technically there are many ways to include foreign code. In very simple cases you might just copy over code, in most cases you are going to link against a library and sometimes...
Browserify is a nifty little tool that was originally invented to let Node.js modules run in your browser. A nice side effect of this is that you can use browserify to split up your application’s JavaScript into a well organized modules and then...
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...
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...
Most of you might agree that the pace of web-evolution was impressively intense last year. (Yeah, the web is dead, we just haven't found a new name for it yet.) From a business perspective, 2010 was also pretty good, with many services empowering...
We are currently working on some interesting project where we have the chance to distribute some video footage with the new HTML5
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...
In this post, two possible implementations of the ActiveRecord design pattern will be discussed. With the raise of Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord became very popular to the IT crowd. by Sebastian To put the concepts of this pattern in a nutshell:...
Firefox really makes you more productive when developing web applications or websites. Not because of its good browser engine - but because of the countless add-ons. I would like to present some of my favorite plugins which are a must have for...
