Elements

Our developer Way of Working: a project at Elements

As a Developer at Elements, whether it’s mobile or web, you work on one or two different projects at the same time. This way you have focus on your codebases, but also some variety in your work. To…

Tips for a Junior Developer by a Junior Developer

Carlijn has been part of the Elements team in Almere since last October. She is 27 years old and has been working as a Junior Front-end developer for a year now. In this blog she will tell you about…

Almere & Barcelona connected by Elements

With more than 17 nationalities and two offices in the Netherlands and in Spain, one may call Elements an international company. What is it like in both offices? How is the communication between…

Python Tips & Tricks: 3 hacks for starting a Tesla factory

In this blog post I would like to show you 3 Python tricks that prove that Python is awesome. Imagine you are the boss of a cool car factory, like Tesla. To keep your reputation you want to produce…

iOS Guide: Unit testing business logic with RIBs and Sourcery

For iOS projects at Elements, we use Uber’s RIBs architecture. RIBs stands for Router — Interactor — Builder. RIBs is built with (among others) testing in mind: individual RIBs classes have their own…

Let’s pay some attention to the man behind the curtain: the Land of SysAdmins.

First described in around 1st century Anno Domini, the race for building a steam engine properly picked up in the early 18th century. The oohs and aahs as well as coins and the grants, some wicked…

Guide: Creating a Cocoapod using Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile library

This post is about how colleagues and I managed to create a usable cocoapod using Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile, host it in a private repository and making it proper maintainable.

Building an iOS and Android app in React Native — The benefits for businesses

React Native is a framework written in JavaScript that can create an iOS and Android mobile applications with one code base, shared by both platforms. As most of the time an app needs to be available…

The secret is in the process. How we bring quality code to our customers’ applications.

Most people think quality is a property you just add to products by investing time and money. Like you could buy a very poorly done omelette and improve it by just cooking it more, that’s clearly not…

Starting a new job from home

As a software developer, I am grateful for having the possibility to work from home. When you are comfortable within your team because you already worked with the same people in person before the…

Jetpack Compose, future of Android’s UI?

Android’s layout system is now as old (10+ years) as the platform itself and has accrued technical debt during its many development iterations. Some of the problems with view widgets on the platform…

Why our team is not yet switching to Adobe Xd.

Adobe MAX 2019 was awesome and we were very excited about the keynotes presenting all the work they’ve done on their products. We were unfortunately not present, but watching the live stream…

A day of inspiration at the Stedelijk Museum

Last Friday the design team took a couple of hours from work and visited the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam to get inspired by all the quality creative work that this modern and contemporary museum has…

Cupcakes, code & unicorns

On Saturday 22nd of June, the Elements office hosted the first Almere edition of Django Girls, a free programming workshop for women. Django Girls is an amazing initiative with the aim to promote…

Load Testing and Optimizing a Business-Critical Application

In this article I will explain the challenges we faced and solutions we implemented during the development and production release of a project we have been working on for about one and a half years.

How Elements Helps Democracy in the Netherlands

Elements teamed up with long-time partner KPN to create a scalable and multi-platform solution to assist and support polling station staff during elections in the Netherlands.

Docker Application Packages in a Nutshell

A few months ago, at DockerCon US 2018, an experimental tool was announced: docker-app. This tool, as Docker describes it, is built to make docker-compose files reusable and shareable.

Building an Optimised E2E Flow System with Cypress

So, there are several posts out there, also on Medium, about how to test your application using Cypress. But, this time I’m going to focus on the approach my team took while building the end-to-end (E2E) testing system for a project we have been working on for a while. I will try to focus on the testing part and be as agnostic as possible about the tools, libs and frameworks we use in the project itself.

Takeaways from DevOps World 2018 — Part II

This is my second post that is inspired by my visit to DevOps World 2018. My first post was about continuous deployment (CD) using Jenkins and Kubernetes. One of the recurring topics on DevOps World…

Takeaways from DevOps World 2018 — Part I

I was in San Francisco last week to attend DevOps World 2018 (also known as Jenkins World). This conference is about all things DevOps with a focus on Jenkins and Kubernetes. At KPN, we are in the…

API Request Signing in Django (2)

This article is the second and final part on API request using Django Rest Framework. In the first part we explained what API signing is, why and how to apply it in your Django projects. Basically…

Is asyncio too hard to use? Try Trio!

I’m working in a project with asyncio and aiohttp and sometimes it is confusing and difficult to test. This year I went to EuroPython 2018 in Edinburgh and attended some talks about Trio. Afterwards…

Adventures of an iOS developer in Python

Hi. I attended the EuroPython 2018 conference in Edinburgh 23–29 July 2018. I really liked Francesco Pierfederici’s workshop called Ridiculously Advanced Python and I want to share my experiences…

A green internship at Elements Interactive

Hi, I am Nienke, 16 years old and a VMBO-T student at Clusius College. Clusius College is a “green school”, meaning next to general subjects like math, Dutch and English we have extra subjects like plants, animals and agriculture.

API request signing in Django

This article is intended to give you insights in request signing and how to implement it in the Django Framework. This article assumes familiarity with Python/Django. The story begins when an…