Kilobites by Sanico

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. In this post, I’ll share my personal journey of adapting to remote work and how practical strategies helped me grow, not just professionally but as an individual.

Expectations vs. Reality of Remote Work: Before starting my remote internship, I had certain expectations about what it would be like, from online videos, articles, and blog posts about remote work. Some of these expectations were met but some took me by surprise.

Flexible schedule: I expected remote work to give me complete control over my schedule. However, there is some flexibility, but I still need to follow team schedules, deadlines and meetings.

Challenges in Communication: Expecting that communication is all online, I anticipated potential delays in communication. Although delayed responses are part of the remote experience, I’ve been fortunate to have great support from my mentor, Sav who has always been quick …

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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 set up a development environment and onboard new employees. Simple in theory, a mess in practice.

This whole process saved me $1000’s in wasted engineering time all for a total cost of $0 to my business.

Let’s Go Back to Go Forward

Prior to founding Sanico Software I worked as a Software Engineer at several large private and public firms which includes IBM, the Australian Federal Government, and others. I remember when I started as an intern they sent me the link to the GitHub repo, pat me on the back, and said good luck.

Even worse, at another internship the team denied me access to the main repository because they claimed it required an excessive amount of time to onboard someone.

I remember at one large firm on the first day I downloaded the code and asked my mentor:

Me: “What version of Node and NPM do I download?”

Mentor: “Ummmm I don’t know, the latest?”

I downloaded and installed the latest version of Node and NPM but the project failed to execute. As an intern I felt bad to speak up, instead I tried …

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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. Separate to this, Basecamp actually provide an excellent service that we utilise ourselves.

1. Ensure the website really did copy you

I have had clients claim a website copied them but it was just a competitor in another country wholesaling from the same supplier. There is no crime for competitors to sell the same wholesaled product with similar imagery that the supplier provides.

Look deeper at the website’s contact information, about page, collection descriptions etc. and identify if there is copied text/images.

2. Search WHOIS to find the owner/registrant

There are many WHOIS tools you can use but you can just use the link in the title above to whois.com.

WHOIS is a protocol that queries databases which store information about an internets resource’s registered users or assignees.

Essentially, we are able to get further information on the registrar, name servers and abuse contacts.

3. Find the registrar and servers being used

The registrar should be one of the …

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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 business. They dream to create a piece of software that people use globally. A subscription based SaaS model where customers pay monthly for sub-par services while business owners sit on a beach in Mexico lapping up the sun.

I picture a company like a tree. Every tree starts as a seed. Then it grows organically with the right level of nurture, water, sunlight, favourable weather, and optimal location.

From a seed to a seedling, from a seedling to a sapling, from a sapling to tree, and from a tree to a mature and established tree.

No, it’s not impossible to grow a software business organically, I myself started my software business from the ground up. Zero clients, zero word of mouth, zero funding, zero software, zero everything.

With a slow organic growth it provides the opportunity to learn every facet of the business. Skills that over time a business owner may hire an employee to fulfil. The skills I learnt include sales, negotiating, law, bookkeeping, human resources, accounting, marketing, and …

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Google provides an excellent tool to assess your website’s 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.

Step 1: Get the website url you want to test

Go to the website you want to test and highlight the entire url in the url bar. Right click the entire url and click copy to have it ready to paste into the PageSpeed Insights tool. For privacy of the company being tested, I have blurred the first part of their name.

Step 2: Go to pagespeed.web.dev

Click here to go to the PageSpeed Insights tool and paste your url into the input field. Then, click Analyze. Ensure you stay on the page as the test runs.

Step 3: View the scores on Mobile & Desktop

Commonly, your scores for mobile will be noticeably different than your scores for desktop. PageSpeed Insights simulates the mobile with limitations such as CPU power and internet speed. This is an important distinction. We often use our mobiles on 4G or 5G and have less CPU power than the average computer. It is imperative to get scores up for both screen …

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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. However, if you want to edit specific products, check the boxes next to the products names you want to edit.

Step 2: Select Bulk Edit on the Interface

You should see a button appear that says Bulk edit. Shopify continually updates their interface so it may have changed places but this is the button you’re looking for - click it.

Step 3: Begin Bulk Editing

If you have ever used Microsoft Excel in its most basic form, the bulk editor is representing the same thing. This is an editable spreadsheet that increases your speed of editing products.

Please note, you may have to scroll to the right to view further columns that are not viewable on the screen.

Step 4: Add Missing Columns to Bulk Editor

If you can’t see a field you want to edit on a product, click the columns button as seen in the above image. Scroll through the list of available columns and tick the checkbox that you want added to your spreadsheet.

Step 5: Make sure …

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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?

PS: 1 helped 388 tech companies bring consistency to the story, core message, and value proposition… using a new sales deck.

PP x2: Here is what I had in mind -> https__[WEBSITE LINK REDACTED]___.com

Let’s break down her message…

Paragraph 1: Say something exaggerated to get my attention. “A tsunami, flamingos, and pigeons”, I have never met anyone start a conversation like that in person. She’s going for shock factor.

Paragraph 2: She insinuates she knows how to get higher conversions and asks if I am open to hearing about her secret sauce. Who would answer no to that question? In other words, she attempts to ask an irrefutable question to get someone to say “yes”. Yuck.

Paragraph 3: She quotes an oddly specific number “388” in an attempt to increase its realism. She is no longer beating around the bush but instead is affirming she has the secret sauce to land more business.

Last sentence: A link to her website, therefore, for …

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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 you 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.

It can make a human feel degraded and less than important if they realise your responses lack authenticity. There is very little incentive to respond to a robot.

Recent Example of Frustration

We had multiple individuals recently provide their resume to work for our company. I took quite a liking to a particular individual, had met them in person and interacted with detailed responses. I then began receiving large responses generated from an AI tool. Maybe this individual thought it was clever but instead it felt instantly impersonal and showed a lack of respect.

My opinion on this topic may be unpopular and others may enjoy communicating through automated responses… Just remember, if everyone is generating their responses through AI, it will only make the authentic responses stand out clearer. Spelling mistakes, misuse of grammar and styles of writing are becoming more prevalent in identifying the authenticity of responses. …

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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:

Ok now you see it. What’s its purpose? If it’s in the server rack it must be important, right? No is the answer I eventually discovered. Another IT contractor left this CISCO box powered on doing nothing for over 5 years. Yeah 5 years! Plugged in, doing nothing. It was part of an old VOIP system that another contractor replaced but they left behind the CISCO box.

When I discovered this I thought about it for a while. Who would leave a CISCO box for that long? Then it dawned on me, people that take less pride in their work.

I now want to show you another picture:

Same same, but different. This is the image of how we left the server rack when we finished upgrading the devices inside for my client. Clean, easy on the eyes, and with clear separations between the devices. Even a person that knows nothing about the devices inside would look at it and say: “now that’s neat”.

Now the same experiment, but with the before and after of the server rack. I want you to tell me, which one looks like someone took …

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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 black’s chances have 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.

My curiosity runs deeper to the predictions we make in day to day life.

Are gambling predictions different to the real world predictions?

If we talk about casino games, these have extremely clever win ratios that are stacked against the player - they are calculable. For instance, most people don’t realise that placing a bet on red in roulette has less than a 50% chance of winning (see image below).

Therefore in the case of casino games, it is an artificial world with calculable odds - this does not reflect the real world.

However, when we wander outside of the bricked fortress with no windows, gambling in the real world becomes odds determined by past events and pundits. Similar to real life, I would argue each person is a pundit in their own way and creates odds for predictions in their day to day life. The two suddenly share many similarities.

Can you give an example please?

Alright, my …

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