Sanico's Blog

I have dealt with many clients in the past that have said they don’t need to advertise since they are too busy. I have also witnessed several of those clients hit unexpected dry spells that resulted in a frantic search for more business. In my opinion, there is rarely a bad reason to prepare for the near-future, especially in a world that changes from day to day. How can you prepare for the near-future?

When a new employee starts I ask them to upload a portrait shot of their faces for every account they use internally at my company. Not a picture of their dog, not a picture of the beach, and not a picture of their favourite anime character. A picture of them. I request them to add a portrait shot of their face because of the wise words that my professor in America said to me long ago:

Google reviews are critical for establishing credibility and demonstrating past client/customer satisfaction. Below is a quick and simple guide showing the easiest way to request more Google reviews for your business listing. 1. Find your Google My Business Profile You must be logged-in to the Google account that owns or is a manager of the Google business listing. Click the top right icon and either login or check which account is currently active.

Imagine starting your very first job as a software engineering intern and finding yourself not in those bustling tech offices or recreating those ‘day in a life as a software engineer’ videos you see online but in the comfort of your own home. The realm of remote work has become your reality. As a working student who transitioned from a traditional office environment to a remote software engineering role, this shift felt like exploring unknown waters, bringing in new knowledge, processes and challenges.

From their first day my two Software Engineering interns contributed code to our software project with a complete programming environment setup through the use of one command, all thanks to my current favourite piece of software, Devbox. Every so often a software application amazes me, Devbox 100% hit the sweet spot. For any software devs out there we all know the pain to setup up a development environment and onboard new employees.

You’re not alone. As your website increases in popularity, so does the target on your back. A very common issue I have recently seen is scammers copying a website, making it look identical and tricking customers into fake purchases. Below are a few steps you can take to fight this issue. Please note: Basecamp has been used purely as an example domain and this is not a reflection on their company.

All over LinkedIn and the general internet I see posts about how companies receive millions in funding. New companies with no product, no clients, and no business experience. Instead they possess a handful of hope and a bank full of millions of dollars to burn through. These hopeful business owners, in particular in the software industry, aspire to create a unicorn software businesses. They dream to create a piece of software that people use globally.

Google provides an excellent tool to assess your websites key metrics and identify core issues. More specifically, PageSpeed Insights provides a report assessing the performance of your website loaded on both mobile and desktop devices. For quick reference, I have linked the docs here if you are interested in the technical aspects of PageSpeed Insights. Below are a few steps on using the tool and improving your websites poor speeds, poor accessibility and poor vitals.

Managing a large range of products can be tedious work. It can become time consuming navigating through each product and editing them individually. This is a quick guide on how you can bulk edit your products faster which is built into Shopify. Step 1: Navigate to the Products tab from the Shopify Dashboard From here, select the products you are wanting to edit. In this case, I have clicked the check box that selects all available products.

Does anyone else on LinkedIn get their inbox filled with a boat load of spam? I want to know the people that would reply to a message like the one below. Hi Sav, In the tsunami of identical messages bombarding you, here is a flamingo swimming in a yard of pigeons. But seriously… If I could show you a way to help the conversion rates for the team, would you be open to learning more?

This is a personal opinion and perspective from a software engineer. Given, maybe doing this to unsuspecting and less tech savvy individuals may work, but this is a big no in my books. If God (or whoever your believe in) makes everyone powerful, in reality, no one is powerful. Tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Perplexity, Jasper etc. are great for particular situations but they should not become replacements for general communication between humans.

No long intro, instead a question. If you look at the server rack below would you say the previous IT contractor took pride in their work? 100% you would say no. If in doubt, I will shortly show a clean version but first I want to show you something else. Can you see it? Yeah, right there at the bottom, the CISCO box. The good old CISCO 870 Series. Let’s get a zoom on that:

It is hard not to predict the future from the past. The whole basis of our judgement often comes from our past experiences. Even public resources explain in gambling, say the roulette table, that just because red was rolled 10 times straight doesn’t mean blacks chances has increased - the events are independent. However, majority of people think that a number or colour may appear since it hasn’t appeared yet - this even has a definition named The Gamblers Fallacy.

Everything you do adds up. That blog post you wrote. That website page you added. That Instagram Reel you made. That YouTube video you published. That client you made happy. It all adds up. In an airport in Rome, Italy I ran into an ex-coworker from IBM that upon discovery I ran my own software business asked immediately: “How did you find your clients?” Well… that was a complex question to answer in a short span of time as we awaited our baggage at the airport.

There you have it, folks. I don’t want to write this blog post. Is that too blunt? Too rude? Too… lazy? Perhaps, it’s all of the above. But, what’s the one thing that it definitely is? Honest. A round of applause for me. Just kidding, please don’t do that. Not yet, at least. Let us track a little further back. Sav (The ‘Sa’ in Sanico) reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in writing a reflective piece for their blog about some contract work I did for them, which included some IT Maintenance work, such as Hardware Installation - my fancy way of saying ‘I set up computers’.

As a web developer I create blogs for many of my clients and constantly send out a list of guidelines to help them on their journey to successfully write blog posts. The guidelines consist of tips, advice, and criteria. In these guidelines I consolidated all of my learnings into a single referenceable source of information for myself, my clients, and the general public. I sourced the tips, advice, and criteria from renowned sources such as the Google SEO team and my own expertise after 4 years of writing various blogs.

Since January 2024 Shopify sent out a flurry of emails to warn store owners to authenticate and add a DMARC record to continue sending branded emails from their domain, as per the screenshot cover picture of this blog post. I received an inundated amount of requests for help from my clients and people around the world from a reel on Instagram and YouTube that I posted. Many Shopify store owners saw the warning but due to the technical barrier they failed to fix the problem themselves.

I recently spoke to the founder of an innovative email service company called Buttondown Email. No, I don’t know the founder. No, this was not an interview for my blog. This was a sales enquiry. I contacted the sales staff as I required a custom premium feature and to my suprise the founder of the company, Justin Duke, responded to me. What the heck!!!! This guy runs a decent sized technology company and personally responds to sales requests.

Website Tip #10: Create a mobile first website. To any business that reads this blog post I encourage you to stop reading, go view your own website on a mobile phone, and then come back to this post. Alright, now answer the following questions: Did my website load fast on mobile? [yes/no] Did my website look good on mobile? [yes/no] Did my website work well on mobile? [yes/no] If you answered no to at least one of the above questions then let me tell you 2 critical things:

For those that use TinaCMS I will show you how to add hidden fields to the metadata of your content files. I utilise several default fields within the YAML of my content markdown files and I wanted to add them with TinaCMS when a user creates a new entry to a collection. After I read the well written TinaCMS docs I noticed that no option existed to add default values and hide them from the user interface of TinaCMS.

I will show you 4 beautiful websites that recently caught my attention. Every now and again as I surf the web I come across a few websites that make me say: “dammmnnnnn that’s nice”. Just like a car enthusiast when they see a classic and rare car go past, as a web developer well designed websites catch my eye. Without any further ado, here are the 4 websites. Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the organisations mentioned, I earn no commissions, I added no affiliate link, and I am not endorsing any of the websites or their services.

Myself and my brother Dom created one of the most particular and unique websites for a local wine label called By Fabiano. Fabiano, a local SA winemaker and his business partner Alex wanted to create a custom ecommerce storefront for their unique new wine label called By Fabiano. Based in Mclaren Vale South Australia they produce a high quality wine with roots to their Italian heritage as described by this excerpt from their website:

Once upon a time a fake, cunning, and wretched SEO salesman approached one of my clients. He ran a questionable report, with a questionable analysis, and with a questionable video of him explaining SEO concepts. My client signed up for $500 a month for this service as she honestly wanted to improve her website. This bloke charmed her with his magic and promised her the thing everyone wants but can’t have without payment, a spot at the top of Google.

I wrote a program to transfer 496 ecommerce products from Wix to Shopify. We performed this transfer for Rachel, the owner and operator of Essence & Soul on King William Road in Adelaide, South Australia. She previously utilised a Wix store to sell her catalogue of over 496 products but we recommended she move to Shopify as we flat out refuse to build ecommerce stores with use of Wix due to its inferiority.

The good old solution. Just run an ad, get the business. What folly. “Just run an ad”: the dream that social media companies want to sell businesses to get their greasy fingers on their money. Oh you haven’t heard? An ad a day keeps the doctor away. Says the fake doctors called social media companies that bully and pester you until you buy their ads. Before you get your pitch forks and knifes out I want to clarify that I am not against ads, value exists in them as I explain towards the end.

The start of any new project normally weighs up questions such as “What’s the expected ROI (return on investment) of this project?” or “If we provide this feature, what’s the increase in cost going to be?”. These are excellent questions. But how do you answer these when it comes to maintenance? What do you do when you have a piece of software that works, but has not been worked on in years?

View the published website We recently published a new custom Shopify ecommerce website for the very popular and well known strawberry farm Harvest the Fleurieu in South Australia. Allis reached out to us on Instagram after she saw us complete a website for another awesome South Aussie called Within the Candle Chaos Co. I am not sure why but the pronunciation of Fleurieu always sends me to a world of confusion, I think it’s the mix of characters that throws me off.

EDIT: 31/10/2023 The competition is now closed, out of all the entries no one successfully guessed the sentence which was quite interesting. I have a screenshot of the sentence at the end of the blog post for any curious cats out there. Feel free to read the post and see if you can guess the sentence without looking at the screenshot below, good luck! Thank you again to everyone that entered the competition.

I hear the word algorithm a lot. The Instagram algorithm, the Facebook algorithm, the Youtube algorithm or even Google’s ranking algorithm. There is a lot of misinformation regarding algorithms, especially since many people consider it black magic. I want to shed some light on algorithms from the perspective of a software engineer. What is an algorithm? Good question. Let’s start out by stating that it is not witchcraft. An algorithm is a process that performs operations based on a set of overarching rules.

Many years ago when I interned for a large software organisation I spoke up about bad code. On my first days as an intern I received my assigned project. I pulled the project from GitHub and opened the file, a monstrosity of over 2000 lines of poorly written, undocumented, uncommented, and untested code of an ExpressJS application. I spent literally 2 months in an attempt to refactor the code to allow me to add new features.

In the software industry I meet many people who deem themselves as technical wizards, those who live and breathe software for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They know and understand things about software that others know nothing about. Most of these technical wizards, in my experience, lack people skills so when people enter their dungeon to ask a technical question they give what I call, the scoff of superiority. The scoff, you know, that exhalation of breath.

I hear this one a lot, the complaint that to start a business you must do something new or different. BS. One person I know told me of their concept for a business but reeled back on it when they discovered someone already created a similar business. So what? Who said there wasn’t room for another business to do the same thing? Who said it had to be different to succeed?