Kilobites by Sanico

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 pitchforks and knives out I want to clarify that I am not against ads, value exists in them as I explain towards the end. Instead I want to highlight that I see many companies just run an ad and outright neglect their website conversions.

If conversions suck… well, you guessed it, just buy more ads. The endless ad pit that makes social media companies handsome rich. Have you ever heard of a social media company that recommends you run less ads?

Imagine this conversation:

Me: Hi Mr Social Media Company, I want to run more ads please.

Social Media Company: Wow, hold up, you have run enough, have you not noticed your website conversions aren’t up? You probably should focus on fixing up your website or working on your product instead of running more ads.

A level headed response that would never happen.

Some people brag to me that they land business purely from ads. Sure, traffic driven to the website through ads makes sense. However, if people struggle to checkout or fail to purchase a product then …

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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?

That old faithful, the thing that keeps the lights on while the rest of your company is trying to think of new ways to innovate and increase your gross margins. She was there making you money when that last idea only boosted MAU (monthly active users) by 1%, but cost 5 times more to implement. You didn’t have time to update to the latest LTS (long term support) but you got that new feature out on time. Onto the next idea, and on it goes until you are so far behind it’s now going to take longer to update. But what’s the return on investment of updating software?

Keeping software up to date is easy when all you have to do is bump the version number, but when it requires a code change, there never seems to be a good time to do it. How do you tell your product team that you need time to update software so you can’t work on that new feature they want? No, patching a security vulnerability isn’t going to increase revenue, but it may …

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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. However, no stress, on confirmation from Allis I am happy to share the correct pronunciation is: flu-re-o.

The Old Wix Website

Allis reached out to us as she first attempted to create an ecommerce website with Wix during the pandemic to service clients from a distance. The old website utilised a template that she customised to suit her brand. She wanted to take the website to the next level so she reached out to us and contracted us to build something unique and custom for Harvest the Fleurieu. I put a few pictures of the original website below.

The top part from the original Harvest the Fleurieu website.

The contact us form from the original Harvest the Fleurieu website.

The original Wix website contained several contrast issues as seen in the contact us section above, misaligned text, unoptimised images, poor load times, and many other problems. The problems stem from poorly designed templates produced by …

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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 will give $500AUD to whoever guesses the Bard Chatbot generated sentence in this blog post, read to the end and see if you can spot the difference. It’s like a where’s wally with words. More info at the end of the post.

Ok, so…

Why on Earth pay someone money to guess a Chatbot generated sentence within my blog post? To raise awareness and make a point.

Real writers exist that write real and authentic blogs. Content that you read and think, wow, what a fantastic post.

In my recent searches of the internet I constantly stumble across blog posts with little sense, devoid of personality, an inconsistent writing style, and plugged with 1 billion affiliate links. As a generally sceptical person I now read things with double the scepticism than before. Every post I read I can’t help but think: did they really write this or was it ChatGPT?

With the rise of Chatbots such as ChatGPT, Bard, Microsoft Bing AI, they generate a decent enough sentence that makes you …

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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.

Definition from Oxford Languages found on Google.

In non-robotic terms, completing a task like running requires your legs to move one in front of each other, your knees to lift just below your waist and your feet to push off the ground while you lean forward. There are more steps but this is not a fitness blog. However, given a set of rules, an action or operation such as running has its own algorithm. Even more interesting is that many people run differently, adhering to their own set of rules and therefore creating many algorithms. If there is an algorithm for running, you can only imagine the vast amount of algorithms we use every day.

Person running using their own algorithm.

What about social media algorithms?

We as humans have many algorithms and big software applications also have many algorithms for different processes - not one almighty algorithm to rule …

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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.

I discovered that the previous intern who wrote the original code qualified as an Electrical Engineer not a Software Engineer. After I heard that I understood why the individual failed to follow best practices. I am sure I would struggle to follow best practices if I attempted to create electrical schematics as I lack an Electrical Engineering degree. Stick to your lane!

As I trudged through the murky code another full-time employee who sat adjacent to me asked about my progress on the project. I replied honestly and said the previous intern wrote the application very poorly. At first he seemed quite surprised but continued to listen to my feedback about the project and why I thought it seemed poor.

I thought no more about this conversation. I told the honest truth and provided valid reasons. I moved on. Weeks later I spoke with another employee about my future and that I wanted to stay on with the organisation, he replied with sass that he thought I needed …

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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. The shock that you don’t know the answer and they do. A breath of air that slaps your face with the regret that you even asked the question to begin with. The scoff where you feel inferior for that moment of time and the scoffer feeds off the ego boost that they know the answer.

I remember when I first started within the software world I knew very little about how the industry worked. I remember at an old workplace I used to ask questions to the undisputed expert, a technical software wizard of sorts. I entered his office and asked him technical questions and it always proved difficult. He mocked questions, scoffed when I failed to understand a concept, and gave incomprehensible answers that only other wizards understood. For example:

Me: “So could I use Python to create this application?”

Wizard: <scoffs> “Obviously, if you studied you would understand the answer.”

A contrived example …

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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?

Plenty of butchers exist yet people still open butcher shops.

Humans have consumed bread for 1000s of years but new bakeries still open.

Clothes aren’t a new concept yet new brands pop up every day.

Sure you can do something different and come up with a new concept, power to you! However, to claim another business already sells the same products or offers the same services so it invalidates your potential to start a business is folly. Folly I say!

I almost shiver every time I hear someone overuse the word innovation, not because I disagree with the concept but instead its misuse and forceful behaviour. It pushes this odd agenda that you must innovate or be… dare I say it… entre.. oh god… entrepre… here it comes……… entrepreneurial, save me! Damned this word, I know very few business owners that use this word, instead they just call themselves business owners. They run businesses not draw ideas on pieces of paper.

To recalibrate so we’re on the same page: I am not against innovation, …

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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 starting 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. An idea that we all live with today, thanks to my friend. Actually no, he never implemented the idea. Instead he thought and spoke about it a lot but never advanced to the implementation stage. Now in hindsight he swears even today if he went through with the idea and built it then he would be a millionaire.

I meet many people who claim to possess fantastic ideas, with promises that if I just created their software app idea then I would be printing money. One person even said “hey I got this idea, but don’t go make it, it’s my idea”… well if it’s secret don’t tell me!

Ideas cost nothing, the moment one thinks it, the idea exists. Unfortunately with implementations they chew up countless hours or if not years of time. Not just time but money. Let’s do an example together to illustrate my point.

The Idea: I have an idea to …

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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. This decision is extremely poor practice and whether malicious intent, incompetence, an honest mistake or just laziness, it breached the trust of the owner of the company.

This situation left my client both happy and upset. Happy that they found a software auditor like myself that discovered and informed them of a serious issue with the code. Upset that the software developer overseas that they hired with a Freelance Platform failed to provide all the source code, as promised in the original agreement.

In the end it all worked out, I worked with the client to discuss the situation with the software developer and retrieve all the source code necessary to execute and maintain the application. I am still unaware if the developer failed to hand over all the code with malice intent or they made an honest mistake. I perform software audits, not criminal investigations. However, it serves as an excellent warning to anyone that utilises platforms such as …

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