Sanico's Blog
A technology focused blog with strong opinions brought to you by Sav and Dom Tripodi, the faces behind Sanico Software. Welcome dearest reader.
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Sep 25, 2024
Working in a Remote Software Team: My Journey as a Software Engineer Intern
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.
Read NowAug 27, 2024
How We Used Devbox to Onboard New Devs Rapidly
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.
Read NowAug 20, 2024
Someone Copied My Website - What can I do?
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.
Read NowAug 6, 2024
10 Million Funding vs An Organically Grown 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.
Read NowMay 30, 2024
How to Fix Website Performance with Google PageSpeed Insights tool
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.
Read NowMay 22, 2024
Shopify: How to Edit Shopify Products in Bulk
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.
Read NowMay 14, 2024
LinkedIn Spam: Is anyone else getting spammed?
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?
Read NowMay 9, 2024
Don't Communicate with Unedited AI Responses
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.
Read NowApr 30, 2024
The Forgotten CISCO Box: A Lack of Pride in Your Work
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:
Read NowApr 29, 2024
The Past is not Predictive of the Future
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.
Read NowApr 23, 2024
It All Adds Up: Content That Grows and Leads to More Clients Organically
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.
Read NowMar 3, 2024
I Don’t Want to Write This Blog Post
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’.
Read NowFeb 8, 2024
How to Write a Blog Post: Guidelines for my clients and the general public
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.
Read NowFeb 7, 2024
Shopify Store Owners: Authenticate and Add a DMARC Policy to Your Domain
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.
Read NowJan 25, 2024
Buttondown: A Founder Leading by Example with Superior Customer Service
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.
Read NowDec 19, 2023
Mobile First: Why should I design my website for mobile first?
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:
Read NowDec 12, 2023
How to add hidden fields in Tina CMS
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.
Read NowNov 29, 2023
The 4 most beautiful websites I've come across recently
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.
Read NowNov 22, 2023
One of the Most Unique Websites I Have Created: By Fabiano - SA Local Winemaker
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:
Read NowNov 16, 2023
The Fake SEO Salesman: A Warning to Other Small Businesses
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.
Read NowNov 5, 2023
We Transferred 496 Products from Wix to Shopify
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.
Read NowOct 30, 2023
Just Run an Ad: The Neglect of Website Conversions
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.
Read NowOct 23, 2023
The Cost of Software Maintenance: The Qualitative Cost of Old Software
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?
Read NowOct 19, 2023
We built a website for one of the most popular strawberry farms in South Australia: Harvest the Fleurieu
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.
Read NowOct 11, 2023
Does anyone write real blog posts anymore?
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.
Read NowOct 4, 2023
How can I get better results with X’s algorithm? Explaining an algorithm for humans and not robots.
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.
Read NowSep 27, 2023
Software Tales: Speaking Up as an Intern
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.
Read NowSep 20, 2023
The Scoff of Superiority
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.
Read NowSep 12, 2023
That Business Has Already Been Done
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?
Read NowSep 6, 2023
Ideas are Cheap, Implementations Cost
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.
Read NowAug 30, 2023
Warning to Software Companies: Audit Your Software
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.
Read NowAug 24, 2023
Your Shopify website went website down? 7 troubleshooting steps to fix Shopify website issues.
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.
Read Now