simplabs' founder Marco Otte-Witte speaks with Khalid Maliki, co-founder of Tykn, a platform that allows organizations to issue tamper-proof digital credentials that are verifiable anywhere and anytime.
Marco and Khalid discuss the importance of giving team members true ownership over their responsibilities and how to establish the right team structure and a strong culture to run a remote self-managed team successfully.
March 17, 2021
If, like me, configuring GitHub Actions is not your thing and you find yourself wanting to try something before actually pushing it to GitHub (and having to see the effects on real-life), follow this step by step of how to run your GitHub Actions on your own computer.
March 15, 2021
Ember has been around since the early days of the frontend renaissance that already started several years ago by now. It's almost a decade old and dates back well before React, Vue, Svelte and all the others. The framework has never been on the forefront of the frontend hype train but quietly enabled teams to ship steadily and sustainably – among them Qonto and CLARK, two of Europe's Top 50 FinTechs in 2020 (more on their success with Ember below).
In this post, I want to make the case for Ember in 2021 and explain why I consider it a beacon of productivity in the middle of a roaring sea of complexity. While everyone is obsessed with change and innovation (often mistaking the former for the latter), Ember allows teams to excel at executing their product vision and focus on shipping instead of getting lost in low-level rabbit holes where little business value is to be found.
March 12, 2021
simplabs' founder Marco Otte-Witte talks with Aymeric Augustin, CTO of Qonto, a neobank for freelancers and SMEs. Qonto is one of the fastest growing startups in Europe and was voted among Europe's Top 50 FinTechs in 2020.
Marco and Aymeric talk about the disappointment that Agile is in reality, more effective and sustainable development processes as well as challenges around growing teams fast while steadily delivering product value.
February 18, 2021
Animations can be a useful tool to enhance the user experience on the web. Aside from providing an appealing visual experience, animations can aid in the user's understanding of elements appearing, moving and disappearing from a page. This blog post will provide a short overview of the status quo of animating the web and take an initial look at the current capabilities of the Web Animations API.
January 29, 2021
simplabs' founder Marco Otte-Witte speaks with Peter Arnold, the CEO and co-founder of EnterAnGo, an all-in-one travel management tool for business travelers. They discuss challenges around long-term planning and predictability as well as the importance of validating ideas with real users and getting feedback early on.
January 13, 2021
Last week we spent some time researching the current state of XML parsing and
writing in the Rust ecosystem. For a small side project we needed to read an
XML file and turn its content into regular Rust structs. This blog post is a
summary of what approaches we looked into, their tradeoffs and what we finally
decided to use.
December 31, 2020
Marco Otte-Witte talks with Joel Kelly, founder & CEO of Eve, an online platform providing event industry professionals with a modern approach to event management and insurance. Eve provides continuous event optimization through the intelligent use of automation and data.
December 29, 2020
Have you ever been in charge of creating click dummies, interactive demos or that thing that is made from static images and enriched with hotspots, page transitions and states?
Reaching for Invision or Marvel or the built-in features in Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD is your obvious choice. About 90% into the project you realize you need something in the demo which can't be done in the tool you chose. You hit the same wall I did a while ago.
I was looking for alternative solutions and while Framer does provide many possibilities, I wished there was a different tool which would sit closer to the apps we write for our clients. Dummies are a helpful tool to explore new ideas inside an existing product after all.
Given our client apps are written in Ember.js this was bound to be a new addon for the Ember community. Allowing you to create prototypes, while using little code, but with the full power of the Ember.js ecosystem whenever you need it, thus making it easier to explore new ideas no matter if you start from scratch or want to improve on an existing prject.
December 15, 2020
Marco Otte-Witte interviews Karol Domagalski of Upfit, a mobile app that helps people live a healthier lifestyle. Upfit adapts to people's eating habits, working life, budget and time and creates customized nutrition plans, shopping lists and so on.
December 15, 2020