Kilobites by Sanico

I saved significant money and resources in my small business by leveraging the latest AI models. As a Software Engineer and Business Owner I’ve spent 1000s of hours experimenting through trial and error on what works and what doesn’t.

Personally, I don’t know many small to mid-sized businesses leveraging AI properly because they lack the expertise and workforce to set it up in a usable and secure way. On LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and other platforms there is no shortage of bullshit from snake-oil salesmen claiming obscene things.

To counter balance the hype I decided to write this blog series called “AI for Businesses” where I post examples of AI automations in my business, work I’ve done for my clients, general tips and learnings, and other reflections and thoughts.

The purpose of this first post is to set the correct framing. I ask you to leave your baggage of assumptions at the door. The current form of AI isn’t going to replace your workforce and run your entire business while you sip an aperol spritz on a sunny beach in Italy (although that does sound nice).

The Non-Hype Reality Check

To start with: AI can be dangerous as seen with the recent hack involving OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. When set up with incorrect permissions and insecure sandboxes it’s a security nightmare. AI agents will happily delete files, send clients unauthorised emails, expose …

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Many people say business owners have no life with the amount of hours they work. I’m here to tell you that’s BS lies! Working endless hours is a choice, not a mandate. I will share the most impactful method I found to work as a business owner without a compromise to work output.

First, let me describe how I used to work.

The Origins: The Subpar Way of Working

Over 6 years ago when I first started my business I worked day and night to ensure the business’s success. A normal phenomenon for almost every business owner. Every minute not spent on the business feels like a minute towards its potential demise and having to get a job again.

However, after that initial start period I noticed myself, and many other business owners I knew personally, continued to work long hours even when the business started to perform well.

I worked non-stop for around 6 years on my company. Even when we landed lucrative contracts with companies around Australia and the world I found it hard to hit the stop button. My dedication to the success of my business and the evasion of its potential demise led me to work non-stop like a crazy person.

Over the years I began to feel over worked, continually tired, acutely stressed, and mentally fatigued. Instead of listening to my body I kept the petal to the metal and refused to relent.

However, similar to a car, my fuel of passion and …

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I will share with you how I build my company everyday to survive for the long term and the importance of going……. slow. But first, we must speak about trees.

Did you know a tree can break under the weight of its own fruit?

Yes, a tree can overbear itself with more weight than it can handle and subsequently collapse. Not only a branch but I’m talking the whole damn tree.

I never knew about this phenomenon but searched it up after thinking about how I run my small business. I am obsessed about slow, meaningful, and long-term growth. Small and purposeful efforts where the business grows and bears more fruits slowly over a long duration.

The analogy of the tree collapsing under its own fruit hit me when a fellow business owner and long-term friend of mine told me about someone he knew that hired 2-3 team members. They hired these team members within a year of opening their services based business. For me that felt reckless to aggressively increase the head count of the team in the early stages of the business.

Why?

Because for me, in that situation I crunch the numbers. I quickly determine that to hire a new team member I must:

1. organise a job ad,
2. spend company resources interviewing,
3. accept I might not find a valid candidate,
4. ensure correct working rights,
5. speak with my lawyers to ensure I am compliant with Australian (super complex) law,
6. onboard a new team member,
7. perform …

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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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Back when I worked for the Australian Federal Government I read a book called Rework by Jason Fried and DHH. They presented ready-to-go implementable methods to work better in a team and as a business. It left a profound impact on me to this day where I arrange my business around several of those methods.

As a junior-fresh-out-of-uni working for the Australian Government, I met with my manager every week in a fixed meeting that drained my soul. Week by week nothing changed in a significant way, therefore the meeting consisted of nothing meaningful but instead it always led to a general chit chat. After I read the Rework book it presented a better method: daily write ups about what a team member worked on for a given day. This type of automatic check-in allows the whole team to receive situational awareness on what everyone else worked on, without the constant and redundant meetings.

I felt excited and brought it up with my manager. Back then I thought if I discovered a revolutionary idea to work better in a team then everyone would be super keen to implement it. I told him about the book I read, the method, and my idea to implement it for our team. I remember his face to this day: he nodded his head, said “wow, what a great idea”, and then progressed to say “I prefer meetings, but thanks”.

I felt shocked! He asked not one question about the method and automatically dismissed it …

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A local law firm and client of mine reached out to request help with the setup of an Audiovisual link (AVL) for an upcoming court case in country South Australia. Courts use AVL technology around Australia to allow lawyers, witnesses, and others to participate through a video call for a court case. For me, a video call sounds much more comfortable than several hours of driving to a small town far far away. I’m all for it.

AVL technology, or better known as video conferencing, rose in popularity within Australian courts during the pandemic back in the early 2020’s but existed as far back as 2015 in SA Courts.

Not One to Rule Them All

I researched AVL and its usage in courts across Australia and found that there lacks a consistent standard AVL technology. Multiple video conferencing tools exist on the market and courts use a variety of them such as Webex, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and a whole bunch of others. Therefore, the technology for the AVL depends on the court and what they accept.

Courts of recent started to limit the options and instead select a mandatory software that they expect everyone to use. In the case for my client the country court in South Australia requested them to use Webex with an SIP address. A what address? Yes, an SIP address, an older technology nearly no one knows about.

Think of an SIP address like the uniqueness of a telephone number. …

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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.

Getting started: Hardest part first, one step at a time

Typically with any problem or task I always try to figure out the hardest part first, or at least get a rough picture of …

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Today I would like to take you on the journey of how I designed and implemented service pages for Luciano Concrete, a local Adelaide concreter in South Australia. These pages were handmade with HTML, Tailwind CSS, and JavaScript, as we do for all our client websites. They are part of the whole Luciano Concrete website assigned to me by Sav, one of our co-founders and lead devs of Sanico Software, who also mentored me throughout the whole process.

Luciano Concrete was founded by Robbie, a 3rd-generation concreter. Having helped his Nonno and Father (1st and 2nd generation) during school holidays and weekends, Robbie has a wealth of concreting experience and is relationship-oriented with his clients. By making it custom-made instead of using a cookie-cutter template, I was able to better reflect this in a more personalised website, and tailor it to the design tastes of the client more closely.

These service pages are not just helpful for communicating to potential clients what Luciano Concrete could do to help them (and explaining all the concrete terminology and services to those of us who aren’t concreters or builders), but also helps Google and other (potentially AI) search engines discover the company and how they can help the searcher.

So let’s get right into it!

Finding inspiration

Before I started creating the service pages, I browsed the internet to find some …

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An opportunist that sells a dream. A poker player that bluffs the true value of their cards. They promise the world with no follow-through.

When I first started my business many years ago, naive and young, I never heard of the concept of a Carrot Dangler. At first I believed, after a few more I doubted, and now I’m skeptical.

Ladies and gentlemen, new and old business owners alike, allow me to introduce: The Carrot Dangler.

The Origins

Many years ago a financial planner, I shall call him Tony Chobbie, called me on behalf of another client for a job in which they hired my company. Tony, a slick-haired, fashionable, and charming man, called me to discuss the project on the request of my client. As I answered the phone he immediately greeted me in an abrasive but charismatic tone, as if I was friends with him from 10 years ago.

For more context, my client let me know that Tony tried to recommend his “friend” for the job but they chose me instead. They feared Tony recommended the friend not on merit but based on mutual financial benefit. A clear conflict of interest given the friend of Tony sent a substantial sized quote.

In my conversation to Tony, after 10 minutes of general small talk, he dangled his first carrot by flirtatiously saying:

Tony: Sav, ya know what, now that I know you exist, imma send ya so much work, yeah, I got heaps of clients that need software stuff. …

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