Customer Experience 2015: Conference Report

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Shine Technologies

Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Customer Experience Conference 2015 (CX 2015) run by UX Australia.  The conference was about designing customer services, and was coupled with a single-day workshop demonstrating techniques for customer journey mapping.

There are many definitions available for ‘Customer Experience’, but Forrester Research has the best I have found: “How customers perceive their interactions with your company.”

Here are summaries of two presentations that explain what CX consists of and highlight the value of user-centered design methods.

Continue reading →

Posted in UX Design | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Web Directions Code 2015: Conference Report

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Luke Alexander

webdirectionsWeb Directions’ Code is a front end engineering conference that’s been run in Melbourne, Australia since 2012. I was lucky enough to attend this year’s conference, held under the spire at the iconic Melbourne Arts Center.

It featured a number of expert speakers and aimed to provide a refresher on the state of the industry concerning both web development technologies and best practises. This post is a rundown of some of the things I learnt throughout this two day event as well as a detailed look at some of the presentations I found most engaging.

Continue reading →

Posted in Javascript | Tagged | Leave a comment

Upcoming Shine Event: Leveraging Big Data in the Cloud using Google and AWS

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Shine Technologies

big data

Shine would like to invite you to a special event we are hosting in Melbourne on July 8.

In a one-off presentation to be held at ACMI in Federation Square, Shiners Graham Polley and Shane Neubauer will share with you the story of how they helped Telstra analyse massive data sets in a matter of seconds using the power of the cloud.

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Biometric authentication with Touch ID

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Shine Technologies

Touch-ID-640x384

Passwords have become such a pain in the neck. Switching between different apps and websites you will usually find different password security policies. One site will inform you no more than 10 characters, other a 6 digits pin. While some other sites will insist in making you change your password every 15 days, and so on.

Why does this have to be so complicated, and hard to manage? Wouldn’t it be so much easier to use something that you have as a key instead of having to remember so many different passwords across a plethora of different sites!?

Well, there is something that most of us have. Something we were born with. Something we use every single day. That is our fingerprint. Each fingerprint has a unique pattern that can be used as key. In this blog post, I’ll talk about my experience of playing around with Apple’s Touch ID.

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Shine’s Ben Teese to speak at Web Directions Code

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Shine Technologies

webdirections

Shine Senior Consultant Ben Teese will be speaking at the upcoming Web Directions Code conference in Melbourne on June 27th and 28th. Ben will be talking about ES6 Promises.

Web Directions Code is the premier front-end engineering conference in Australia. It features speakers from around Australia and the world talking about new technologies and techniques for the web platform. This year will include a focus on Javascript and new features that will be arriving with the recently-finalised ES6 specification.

If you’d like to learn more about ES6 promises, check out Ben’s recent blog entry on the topic. And if you’re attending Web Directions Code, be sure to check out his presentation!

Posted in Javascript | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

AWS Summit Sydney 2015: Conference Report, Part 2

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Shine Technologies

AWS-Summit_Option-White-Sydney A couple of weeks ago Shine attended an exclusive Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Roundtable, AWS Partner day, and open-to-all AWS Summit day in Sydney. I’ve discussed the Partner Day and Roundtable in a previous post – in this post I’m going to talk about my experiences at the main AWS Summit.

Continue reading →

Tagged | 1 Comment

Building a file explorer on top of Amazon S3

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Shine Technologies

Amazon S3 is a simple file storage solution that is great for storing content, but how well does it stack up when used as the storage mechanism for a web-based file explorer?

Recently I was tasked with doing just this for a client. Furthermore, as opposed to the existing solution (which used CKFinder and synchronised copies of the files between our own server and the bucket), I needed to connect to an S3 bucket directly. In this post I’ll talk about how we did it.

Continue reading →

Tagged , , | 4 Comments

ES6 Promises are here!

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Shine Technologies

The ES6 spaceship has landed and promises are amongst the first new features to come down the ramp. I’m very excited about this.

This is because I love promises. They’ve been lurking around for years in different incarnations, but now that we’ve settled on a standard, I think now’s the time to learn them if you haven’t already.

So in this post I’m going to talk about what promises are, why they’re awesome, and how you can start using them right now.

Continue reading →

Posted in Javascript | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

AWS Partner Summit Sydney 2015: Conference Report, Part 1

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Shine Technologies

AWS-Summit_Option-White-Sydney

A couple of weeks ago Shine attended an exclusive Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Roundtable, AWS Partner day, and open-to-all AWS Summit day in Sydney. In this post – the first of three – I’m going to talk about my experiences at the Roundtable and the Partner day.

Continue reading →

Tagged | Leave a comment

Securing your Spring App using 2FA

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Shine Technologies

2a_02 Not so long ago, a good old username and password were considered more than enough to secure access to our applications and favourite web sites. But back then, nobody could have imagined the countless ways in which a hacker can now get a hold of our precious login credentials. From software exploits to social engineering, security has been drawn into the spotlight like never before, and software developers must really think hard about security when building any type of software solution. In this blog post, I’ll explain how you can secure your Spring applications using 2FA (Two Factor Authentication). Continue reading →

Posted in Web | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments