Timetables are one of those components that look simple but contain a surprising amount of layout logic. For a project in 2026 I needed a version that supports multiple stages, adapts to the tallest session, and stays aligned across the entire...
Historically, the term “amateur” referred to a non-professional lover of the arts, someone who pursued artistic activities out of passion rather than for economic gain. In an era when the boundaries between professional artists and cultivated...
We have all seen amazing artistic or realistic images generated by AI. However, one main challenge for AI image generation is to find use cases that solve problems or boost process performance. One such use case is changing a Model's clothes to your...
For the past three years, 9elements has worked collaboratively with UK agency , helping the World Health Organization (WHO) to visualize global public health data on , WHO’s central data hub. Open health data plays a key role for guiding public...
Let’s take a look at how to fine-tune a model. Flux.1 is an impressive image generation model from that has instantly become one of the most prominent image generation models. One significant benefit is that it can be fine-tuned with just a few...
For an internal project called ‘ControlManiac’, which helps us with all the boring numbers juggling in our software studio, I had to add a global filter to the navigation bar, which lets me select the division I want to filter the data for on...
We've all been there: you're working on a website and need to display a row of logos—clients, partners, sponsors—you name it. However, logos come in all shapes and sizes, and making them look good together can be quite challenging. How do you get...
Building flexible data visualizations for international sites For our international clients, we have created dynamic charts and data visualizations for the web. Charts typically render shapes like lines and paths, rectangles and circles. They contain...
Animating elements in CSS can be challenging, especially when you want to ensure smooth transitions across different screen sizes. One issue that I stumble upon quite often is the inability to divide two length values in CSS. For example, calc(100vw...
In this article, I'm sharing a customizable CSS auto-grid layout. It's a grid component that allows for adjustments in minimum column widths, horizontal and vertical gaps, and even the maximum number of columns to fit various design needs. Since CSS...
This article focuses on leveraging ComfyUI beyond its basic workflow capabilities. You have created a fantastic Workflow and want to share it with the world or build an application around it. By hosting your projects and utilizing this WebSocket API...
Svelte is one of the best bets on technology we have ever made. It’s fast, easy to learn and very ergonomic to use. It gives our teams a quick way to build responsive web apps that can handle a ton of data and complex interactions. Together with ,...
There are many AI tools for image generation, and it seems like a new one is added every day. The results are often very impressive, yet they can also feel quite random. I wanted to try what I could achieve by setting a clear goal and striving to...
Innovating a company from within is a complicated task. You need to identify painpoints in your current processes, you need to create benchmarks so that you can validate changes and you need to have hypotheses to get a gut feeling which are the most...
This Blog post aims to provide a basic overview of the concepts and buzzwords in the AI realm. This is not a technical deep dive or a blog post that explores nuances of different concepts. This blog post introduces each concept or term with a...
Building a reliable search for a web application is hard. Building it for a video-based platform is even harder. For , a German platform offering bite-sized video courses for doctors, we relied on descriptions created by the lecturers who recorded...
In software development, there are few topics as controversial as test automation . The first controversy revolves around the fundamental value of automated tests . What can automated testing achieve and contribute to correct, bug-free software...
If you want an automated system to follow a given set of rules reliably, no matter how complex they are, symbolic logic is the perfect fit for the job. In particular, default logic is well suited when translating experts’ knowledge into...
As developers, we often find ourselves faced with the task of translating design elements like colors, font sizes, and spacing into our code. Alternatively, as designers, we need to summarize and provide this information to the developers. At 9e,...
A few years ago, I had to build a card component that looked a little different than the usual cards you find on most websites. It turned out that this card led to one of my biggest estimation errors because I completely underestimated how...
Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to attend my first 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...
Recently I was faced with the following problem: I had to build a layout that consists of several rows. In each row are two i mages with a fixed aspect ratio. The two images should have the same height and fill the entire row. The images' aspect...
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...
Automated software testing is a controversial topic in the programming community. Some developers are avid proponents of testing and test-driven development. Some developers recognize the value of automated testing but consider the effort to be...
In 2019, I wrote an article on . As a follow-up, I’d like to describe a client project we are maintaining since 2014. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental body that collects data and publishes...
I'm fascinated with the concept of algorithmic layouts and got so used to building whole websites without using any media-query, that I sometimes forget they exist. (You got no idea what an algorithmic layout is? Long story short: It's a component...
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 . We followed to set up a lighthouse client (we love Rust) developed by . But we have the feeling...
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...
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 is now easy to copy CSS code for gradients directly from e.g. Figma, I...
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...
Right about now I get this question a lot, not only from other team members, but from friends and family struggling with working from home the first time and dealing with all the changes that go together with this situation. Since I've worked...
Layouts with diagonal sections are quite popular for several years now. It is not the new hot stuff , and 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...
We have always been big fans of Ethereum, and we've been on the 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 supposed...
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. Admins can usually select a date range, and possibly provide...
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 to size text. So I thought, why not add some custom properties to this mixture...
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 logic in case of unforeseen problems. We had to come up with two interesting...
TL/DR : When you use eight values specifying border-radius in CSS, you can create organic looking shapes. WOW. No time to read it all ?— we made a visual tool for you. During this year’s talked about . At the end of her talk, she...
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 at the start of each test. Abandoning a bad...
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 and I make my living with it, but guess what? I started of with some of these...
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 some time already, and it didn’t take long until the...
We at organize an annual JavaScript conference called . The key visual shows a shaft tower and the conference name executed with a neon light effect. The main page features the full visual with flickering lights. This effect is created by using...
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 including Dropbox and the game studio . Mozilla’s new ...
There are quite a few articles on the web that deal with responsive logos. The most popular example might be the that shows some very well known logos in different variations for different screen sizes. When I first saw this example, I thought...
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 opportunity to create a new forum for people to share their...
Our coders and tinkerers recently launched the new website for our client’s project (engl. #backit). The project aims to collect donations to support children with convicted parents in countries of extreme poverty. The team of Hoffnungsträger...
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? First things first: Facebook Developer...
A tale about language features and HTTP streaming This 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 with insightful KPIs. Surely you don’t want to log into a...
and keep concerns separate along the way The official was dominantly about improvements for debugging. Here I want to talk about a seemingly small change to how supervisor children can be specified. This change demonstrates that the Elixir...
Learn how to serve mp4 files to the Safari browser. With we have a client where we heavily rely on Elixir and Phoenix. Welect is a service you can use to access premium content by paying with your attention by watching ads you choose by yourself....
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...
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 very good trajectory. It is already superior in a...
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,...
Let’s wind back the clock for one and a half years. I just started my new job at 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...
We all need more SSL! But installing SSL certificates is a big PITA. 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 today...
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 of ruby. When running ruby, rails or any other binary...
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 to take a peek into many different tech companies in Germany. In my...
Alright, fellow fullstack developers. In the last few weeks I had the chance to dive into Ember.js - and I would like to give you a complete example of a blog application with Ember CLI for the frontend and Rails as backend server. This article...
This week, the World Economic Forum launched with combined forces of 9elements and the . The report, which covers 112 economies, seeks to improve our understanding of how countries can use a diverse spectrum of policy incentives and...
Some of you may have heard of the new big thing - You may have heard that co-founder Vitalik Buterin was within the Peter Thiel fellowship programme. That Ethereum which pre-sold it’s cryptocurrency, the Ether, last year gaining $18 million in...
I just returned from my German Valley Week trip to San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. is an organized trip where entrepeneurs, investors and politicians from Germany visit disrupting startups ranging from new ones like Uber or Stripe to...
Some of our are gaining 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 by some high...
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...
In July, we have launched a new client site, the . 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 and publishes reports and...
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,...
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 smash them...
Recently we were working on a redesign of the website. Uformit, an online marketplace for personalized 3D design, was already presented at the in London and New York, but never announced to the public. It features a WebGL powered product...
As you might know 9elements is specialized in digital . 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 choosing the...
In one of our recent projects, we needed to implement the ability to sign automatically generated configuration profiles for iOS and OS X in the backend. If a configuration profile is signed and iOS / OS X successfully verifies its signature, the...
One night, shortly after we moved to our new office, Sascha and me where watching some demos on YouTube. You know those 64K executables you run, and think „how the heck they put all that content into 64K“ ?! Well one major idea is, procedural...
In this article, I will first take a high-level look at modern frontend architectures: In a time where web apps easily surpass 1 MB of JavaScript, what should we try to achieve? Second, based on these considerations, I’m going to argue that...
Last week we released , a tool to create data visualizations for the web. It’s free to use and also ! See the for general information. GED VIZ is a large JavaScript (“HTML5”) application that runs in modern web browsers. It’s made using open...
Good visualisations are more than just fancy graphics. They are a lot about storytelling, shedding light on important issues, and at the same time inspiring us to raise new questions. Building such visualisations can be a very time-consuming effort,...
JavaScript application development is a hot topic and people are wondering which framework they should pick. In this post I’m going to compare two of them. and are frameworks on top of the popular library. Both seek to ease the development...
If you are using Core Data, need to change your database scheme but Core Data cannot infer the changes on its own. And you don’t want to dig into the , you have come to the right place. Custom migration is quite a powerful tool and you can perform...
This article explains the set up of a Continuous Integration (CI) environment for Xcode projects that use to implement unit tests. It shows how to configure to set up the correct Ruby environment for , how to install all necessary gems and...
is a relatively new way to manage Xcode library dependencies like the et al. If you are coming from the Ruby world you know this kind of workflow from . CocoaPods can be easily installed as a gem via ‘gem install cocoapods’ but this is where...
There are a lot of awesome jQuery plugins and Javascript libraries out there, and with every new one it gets more difficult to keep track. Some might save you hours of work, others just add that teaspoon of UI love, that , that separates a good UI...
Building websites today is usually a totally bloated and inefficient process: First, there is a designer who creates layouts and designs in photoshop. After that, the designs are iterated together with clients or teams. Making changes to the overall...
No native code should be used for this application. The app is realized as a single-page web application using the popular JavaScript library with for the templates. The map component was built with the powerful . The backend was created...
Today we’re releasing the application architecture of moviepilot.com into the public: Meet Chaplin! In April 2011, Moviepilot, a successful Berlin-based startup, asked us to help building their new product . After having established an...
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...
At Nodecamp 2011, we wanted to present a live tracker built with Node.js. After seeing the popular , I was wondering why not create something like that with live data. The appeal of watching the temporal dynamics within such a visualisation is...
Most of you might agree that the pace of web-evolution was impressively intense last year. (Yeah, , we just haven't found a new name for it yet.) From a business perspective, 2010 was also pretty good, with many services empowering smaller...
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...
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...
We are currently working on some interesting project where we have the chance to distribute some video footage with the new
HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of , and the new betas of and , browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. Most interesting: modern mobile devices like the iPhone or...
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...
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:...
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...
