While working abroad, my Wife and I met many people with a special skill: Making things happen. So, once upon a Friday in Thailand, there were beers, there was killer pool billards and one small problem: Playing with many people gets kinda hard. But what if you could inform them when it’s their turn? What about until tonight? Let’s try!

8 Hours to MVP?

Picture this: a group of web dev wizards, spinning their digital magic wand in harmony, laughing in the face of chaos. Welcome to the world of smartive, where technology, hilarity and innovation collide! We're letting you in on our secret sauce. Behold, following we present the marvelous tools we use that keep us sailing smoothly through the perilous seas of web development.

A glimpse into our agency tool-box

What is Daring Leadership? Is vulnerability actually a human super-power? And what has a marble jar to do with trust? In this post you’ll learn about how to become a daring leader, why tough conversations are crucial for building trust and how to give better critical feedback.

How Daring Leadership fosters Feedback Culture

Imagine a world where web developers double as mad scientists, brewing their own concoctions of productivity and fun. Welcome to smartive, where we've created an arsenal of unique tools to improve our organizational machine or simply spread cheer. Strap in as we dive into the delightful world of the smartive tool shed!

Some Tools We Built   

Die bekannte Digitalagentur smartive aus Zürich mit Fokus auf digitalen Produkten, eröffnet einen neuen Standort in St. Gallen, um ihre Präsenz in der Region zu verstärken.

Hoi St. Gallen 👋

We're not your average techies - we like alternative approaches to launching software rockets into the web space. But today, we will not talk about the technical nitty-grits of our tech stack but follow down the rabbit hole an organizational and cultural question.

Our New Work Operating System

Rust has changed my programming skills. It morphed the way I think about variables, data ownership, and mutability in general. Learning Rust has made me a better engineer - even in other languages.

The Influence of Rust in my Programming

Animationen machen sowohl der Erstellerin als auch dem Betrachter Spass und dein digitales Produkt wird 👌😮‍💨 statt nur 👍. Hier findest du einen kleinen Überblick über die bei uns verwendeten Animationstools, deren Vor- und Nachteile und mögliche Alternativen.

Animation im Web – unsere Tools im Überblick

Der Heilige Gral der Full Stack-Entwicklung

Wir wollen für unsere Mitarbeitenden der bestmögliche Arbeitgeber sein – und dafür machen wir auch echt viel.

No Boss? No Problem. 🤷‍♂️

Wow, was für ein Jahr! Wir sind gewachsen, haben gefeiert, Zeit für uns selbst genommen, viel gelernt und schöne Projekte mit tollen Menschen umgesetzt. Zeit, nochmals zurückzuschauen und die Highlights Revue passieren zu lassen.

A year at smartive

Sometimes people say: “Security is hard”. And they are - partially - right. It is hard to understand each concept in the vast space of security. It is also hard to be ahead of all the wrongdoers who want to access systems they are not allowed to. So, shall we shed some light upon the topic and explain one popular part in modern web days: OIDC.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to OIDC

Gone are the days when chitchat coffee breaks and shared lunch time at the workplace were seen as something detrimental to productivity.
We now live and work in an era where many employees expect their job to be more than a paycheck. Since we spend a huge amount of our lifetime working, why not do it in a way that enhances well-being?

Those who sweat* together, stay together (*or drink, play, ski, laugh, party, swim…)

Seit bald 10 Jahren sind wir unterwegs - stets mit dem Ziel vor Augen, der beste Arbeitgeber zu werden. Bei uns soll man sich wohl fühlen und es soll Spass machen.

Die 5 Erfolgsfaktoren von smartive

Building accessible components can be time-consuming and complex. In the great confusion of aria-labels, tab indices and focus styles Adobe’s 

 provide a set of React Hooks that will make your life so much easier - that is, if you're willing to take the time to understand them properly first.

How to build an Accessible Dropdown using React Aria

 on and off for over three years now. The more I use it, the more I love it. At first, I thought it was just a next level CSS preprocessor (after 

), a fancy new way of writing CSS code even faster.

I was wrong. ‌‌‌‌It's much more.

How Tailwind gives you magical design superpowers

During the design of a full text search and its search queries, we often make assumptions on how customers will use our search engine. This can only go wrong.

Improve Your Full Text Search

Don’t know where to start? Need a little guidance to see through the nodes and edges? Then this post is for you.

The most popular GraphQL Servers and Clients for Node.js

Heute schon nachhaltig eingekauft? Nachhaltig ins Büro gependelt? Nachhaltig eine Internet-Suche abgesetzt? 

 verfolgt uns auf Schritt und Tritt. Und nervt ein bisschen, weil das Wort für alles und das Gegenteil benutzt wird – Der Unterschied zwischen ehrlichen Bemühungen und Greenwashing ist kaum mehr erkennbar.

Einmal Nachhaltigkeit mit allem, bitte.

Etwas mehr als ein Jahr ist es her, seit wir bei 

 unsere Lohnpolitik auf eine neue Basis gestellt haben. Weg von einer traditionellen, individuellen Festsetzung der Löhne, hin zu einer universell anwendbaren, transparenten Lohnformel. Zeit, ein erstes Fazit zu ziehen und aufzuzeigen, was uns damals zu diesem Schritt bewogen hat.

Die Sache mit dem Geld: Den Lohn auf eine Formel bringen

Which frontend framework is best suited for a component-based design system in 2021?

How Should We React to Stencil and Svelte?

What the pandemic has taught me about minds, monkeys and our stress response.

Insights Born from Stillness

So you have a monorepo set up with Lerna. Wouldn't it be nice if it was delivered continuously, using a pipeline for Continuous Integration and Delivery?

How to Automate CI/CD in a Lerna Monorepo

Learnings from building and maintaining a large modular React Component Library in a Monorepo with multiple Development Teams.

React Micro Frontend Components in a Monorepo

Learnings from using Elasticsearch as a GraphQL Backend and how to make the most out of it.

GraphQL and Elasticsearch: A Love Letter 💌

Since 2019 we have been developing apps for our clients using XState and never turned back to something else.

3 Problems We Encountered Using @xstate/test With TestCafe — and Their Solutions

To pay attention to more personal matters we introduced the one-on-one meeting with a buddy.

New Work & Innovation — One-on-One with your Buddy

My first encounter with the inspiring World of Web Development at 

Deep Dive into the World of Web Development at smartive

How to facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the company by empowering people.

New Work & Innovation — The Advice Process

GraphQL and MySQL: Solving the Join Problem

After nearly a decade of working as a dance teacher, I found myself developing a tool to customise and monitor security standards of single nodes in a network.

Three Semi-Technical Skills I Developed at smartive

Overcoming the Fear of Apollo Server Internals

Advanced GraphQL Patterns: Embrace the AST!

Advanced GraphQL Patterns: The Almighty Root Resolver

Building Enterprise Grade APIs with GraphQL, MySQL and Node.js

In the beginning there was the w̶o̶r̶d̶ YAML – and there was a lot of it!

How we simplified our Kubernetes deployments with an alternative to Helm

This article is meant for people who know the basics of TypeScript but haven’t used it in a large project, and/or haven’t explored its advanced types.

Fun Times with Advanced TypeScript

A feature-rich, good looking MVP. A tight budget; not necessarily money-wise, but a tough time frame. A client you have never worked with. A hard deadline. Sounds like a project from hell, doesn’t it?

Five Things to Consider When Building an MVP on a Tight Budget

Your task is analyzing a complex web application and propose a replacement of the whole stack. How do you go about it?

When Proposing the Replacement of a Complex Web Application, don’t Forget These Ten Aspects

Replacing a legacy application with a modern technology stack? At first it might sound like an opportunity to simply pick whatever technology you always wanted to use and fulfill yourself, but it’s more complex than that.