Image with permission by @bencrothers
Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Agile UX conference in Sydney. A one day conference, run by UX Australia, the topics centred around “designing great user experiences within an Agile environment”. For me, as a non-UX practitioner, my goal was a greater insight into some of the challenges that others in the UX field are facing.
It’s an established trend in the modern software world that if you want to get something done, you’ll probably need to put together a web service to get do it. People expect data and services to be available everywhere, in a mobile world. With the plethora of frameworks and technologies available to go about implementing a web service, it becomes a chore to try using anything beyond what’s already familiar. But every now and then it’s an enjoyable experience to dive into something new and distinctly unfamiliar. Continue reading
In recent years, Spring has become much more than just a dependancy injection container and an MVC web application framework. Nowadays, it’s the go-to for building enterprise solutions due to the fact it has a fantastic community built up around it, and it has a multitude of projects that makes every developer’s life that little bit easier! In this blog post, I’m going to briefly introduce Spring Data REST, and how we used it and an unknown feature called ‘projections‘ on a recent project. Continue reading
Much of our IT work at Shine Technologies deals with fairly dry commercial concepts like page views, web clicks and conversion rates. In this post I’ll describe a personal IT project I undertook with a more tangible “real world” application: adapting a modern car’s electronics to work in a replica of a 1950’s sportscar. I hope that, in doing so, I’ll encourage you to consider playing with microcontrollers and interfacing to the real world too.
It’s being almost 3 months since I start implementing A/B tests for one of our clients and I have to say I am enjoying it a lot.
A/B testing is very powerful technique. Not only does it increase your web site conversion rates, it also promotes innovation and encourages data-driven solutions.
In this article I will give an introduction to A/B testing by asking an important question: what have scurvy, A/B testing and Barack Obama all got in common?
We are living in the information age and are constantly on the quest for more. More information that is. Through the use of the internet, we have access to a wider variety of information than those who lived before us, but still we want more, and we want it faster. What steps are we taking to fulfil these desires? Where will this lead us?
Shine Senior Consultant Ben Teese has had a piece published in the latest DZone Guide to Database and Persistence Management.
In the article, Ben does an overview and comparison of the Firebase, Meteor, and Amazon Cognito platforms. These platforms all aim to solve the use-case of securely storing and synchronising user data across mobile devices.
In addition, they take the work out of having to set up infrastructure and wire it together yourself, and have very impressive real-time updating capabilities. If that sounds like your kind of thing, check out the article!
Back in June 2014, at the annual Google IO in San Francisco, Google unveiled their newest, and much hyped cloud product, Cloud Dataflow. The demo they did that day, using a live twitter feed to analyze supporter sentiment during the 2014 world cup, got my mouth watering at the prospect of working with it. It looked downright freaking awesome, and I just couldn’t wait to get my hands on it to take it for a spin.
WHAT A WEEKEND! I’m still recovering from the 24 hours of coding and the unhealthy amount of coffee and snacks I’ve ingested during this hackathon.
Two weeks ago, Melbourne was host to the first Battlehack of 2015. “What’s a Battlehack?” I hear you ask. Well Battlehacks are competitions sponsored by Braintree (a Paypal company) where teams of developers face off over 24 hours to create the most creative hack that benefits the local or global community. The venue, which was the Plaza Ballroom on Collins St was well worth a mention. The vast ballroom was decked out with food stations, sleep and massage stations, and most importantly, our hacking stations, or tables of 4 for the long night ahead. Continue reading
A clash of the old-school and new-school
Over the last couple of years at Shine we’ve built a number of Single Page Apps (SPAs) for large businesses. An app we recently built had to integrate with Oracle Access Manager (OAM), an Identity Management System (IDM) from everybody’s favourite enterprise software company. In this post I’m going to talk about a strategy that we used to successfully work around mismatches between the way that SPAs and OAM do things.
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