Bryan Susanto

Designer and Software Engineer

Bachelor of Design, Computing and Software Systems from University of Melbourne (top 100 international university)

Hey! I’m a bachelor’s graduate from the University of Melbourne who studied computer science, UI/UX design, and mathematics. Since high school, I’ve enjoyed front-end web development and, more generally, the technical and human side of computing. To me, there’s just a thing about being able to create something that anyone with internet and a web browser can access anywhere. I also find joy in seeing the delight on people’s faces when they use good software and when we can help solve their problems and achieve what they need to. Over the course of my studies, I’ve come to believe that good software is not just clean code and good architecture, but also good design thinking, hence I studied both and continue to strive to pull from both disciplines in my craft. Other than web development, I’m interested in tutoring/teaching and computer graphics, and I play video games in my free time, primarily Minecraft!

You know those times when you’re on this rollercoaster of emotions when debugging something, thinking that you’ve solved it but then another problem comes up? Yeah, this was one of those times.

Context was, I was working on a Phoenix LiveView app called BESTguestbookEVER for one of our clients. It’s an upcoming custom web app for a new startup based in Adelaide, where wedding guests record a video message instead of writing in a traditional guestbook. If you’ve read my previous blog post you would know the story, but a summarised version is that I was working on the video recording feature which required obtaining video and audio permissions. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as simple as just asking for the permissions and the user granting it through browser prompts. There were some additional things I had to do to get it working.

The big part of it was getting HTTPS working locally, since browsers would not let you grant video and audio permissions to websites accessed through insecure connections. If you want more details on that, check out my previous blog post “My journey in getting HTTPS working locally for a Phoenix LiveView app”. But today I’ll be covering the other smaller, but arguably equally important part of getting this to work.

I thought it worked everywhere…

See after getting HTTPS working, I thought it was finally …

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Recently, I was working on a Phoenix LiveView app called BESTguestbookEVER for one of our clients, which is an app where wedding guests record a video message instead of writing in a traditional guestbook. Thus, one of the key features of this web app is the video recording functionality. While implementing the recording functionality itself using web APIs was a relatively time-consuming task, what turned out to unexpectedly be a bigger headache was dealing with browser permissions, especially across different browsers. I thought it’s as simple as just asking the users for permission and then the user granting it through the browser prompts, but uh… no. As they say, the devil is in the details.

Finding out I needed HTTPS locally

The details for everything I needed to do to get video and audio permissions working is a story for another time, but one of the things I had to do was to set up HTTPS on the local development environment. After doing a quick search and reading through forum posts, I found out that web browsers generally prohibit giving video and audio permissions to websites accessed through insecure connections. This makes sense for security reasons, but it’s very annoying when you’re developing locally, since you typically don’t have a TLS certificate and thus no HTTPS connection (but HTTP instead).

What’s even more annoying was …

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Creating a Black Friday Banner in Shopify cover image

Today I would like to share with you the process I went through to design and implement the Black Friday banner for Sticky Vinyl in 2025, a well-known Australian store that sells vinyl for arts and crafts as well as tools for it. This is part of our monthly maintenance for their Shopify e-commerce website as part of Sanico’s Shopify services. The purpose of this banner was to let customers know that there is a sale going on and how much longer the sale was going to last for. This encourages the customers to purchase products while the sale lasts.

The requirements

The following were the requirements for the banner given to me by Sav, one of the lead devs of Sanico Software:

It should be located at the very top of the page, above the navigation bar.
It should only show when the sale is commencing, namely from Friday to Sunday inclusive in the Adelaide timezone.
It should count down the number of days, hours, and minutes left before the sale ends.
It should have a unique design similar to the rest of the website and a reference image I was given.

The following was the reference image Sav gave, with the red crosses indicating that I shouldn’t include those elements from the reference image.