Sanico's Blog

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 past from the future. 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?

Software costs both time and money to write and create. It’s not some magic fairy dust that you wave a wand and earn a butt ton of money. You just wake up with an idea in the morning and earn a billion dollars by nightfall. No. An idea sometimes serves as a start point but an idea alone won’t put food on the dinner table tonight. A friend of mine tells the story of their original idea to customise a car to add a stereo system, people love music so why not add it to a car to enhance the driving experience.

In one software audit a few months ago I worked with a small business here in Australia that hired software developers from a developing country. Within the first three hours of my analysis of the codebase I noticed I lacked the majority of the code necessary to execute the application. Not only that, I uncovered that the software developers hosted a significant part of the code on the internet, visible and accessible to the public.

Did your Shopify store go down? You’ve tried everything but you still fail to connect to your online store? No stress, we help fix, maintain, and create Shopify stores on a daily basis. Problems with Shopify stores happen regularly, you are not alone, I promise. Today I will share 7 troubleshooting steps to help fix your Shopify store and bring it back online. The steps range in technical ability from basic to advanced.

Emails: something almost everyone uses. Love them or hate them they reign king of modern day communication. Tons of apps exist for communication such as iMessage, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Reddit, Google Meets, and many more. From phone calls, text messages, status updates to forum posts and yet email, in my opinion, sits at the top. As a website developer many clients of mine asked if I am able to help them with their emails.

Yes you read it right. I love Software. Software is my passion, something that I lose myself in. Call me a weird geek but I love me some zero’s and one’s. When I write Software I come to life, I feel exhilarated. Whether I program in the morning, afternoon or the middle of the night, time loses meaning. I write Software for work, for pleasure, and for a challenge. Whether paid or unpaid, I am writing Software.

Shopify is a superior ecommerce platform that helps small businesses sell their products online. It has an ongoing cost to use but this cost is offset easily if you have a thriving store. If you are not a developer, you are required to use one of the several free template themes on offer which has its goods and bads. The major good is that you can have a passable website that allows selling online.

You may have heard of ChatGPT but if you haven’t, ChatGPT is an interactive generative pre-trained transformer built on advanced language models… WOAH, let’s make that a bit easier to understand. It is essentially an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that can provide human-like responses to any question you may have. For example, the image below shows the response if I asked ChatGPT to “write a product description for a montessori toy that is colourful and for kids”.

A majority of the businesses that I work with ask me if I am able to integrate their systems with Xero, the software they use for accounting. Most businesses manage several software systems for their daily operations such as a CRM, ecommerce website, inventory system, appointing booking system and much more. However, the software platforms fail to communicate with one another which leads to wasted company resources and inconsistent, incorrect and duplicated data.

When my brother and I founded Sanico Software we started to freelance website design jobs. We began with websites because we knew a market existed for handcrafted, well designed, and well engineered websites. We immediately boomed with business and decided to double down harder on websites. However, the small businesses that we worked with began to ask for more than just websites: “Can you manage my domain?” “Can you set up my computer network in my home office?

We recently worked with an Adelaide based electrician contractor that works on significant projects around South Australia to help customise their quotes, invoices, and job cards in simPRO. I heard several clients mention this software simPRO since I work with other local tradies in Adelaide such as SIMAC Air Conditioning and RP Connections. However, I never directly worked with the software myself. simPRO allows businesses, in particular tradies, to manage their jobs much easier.

When someone starts a business they go straight on the internet and buy a domain name. Usually they buy both the general .com version and the regional version such as .com.au in Australia. They purchase the domain for a multitude of reasons but the major one of course, to prevent its purchase by someone else. Once they establish their business overtime they use the domain for their website, to set up emails, and so on.