Shine Achieves AWS Premier Partner Status & Gen AI Competency
 

Services

We’re excited to announce that Shine Solutions has been recognised as an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner – the highest level within the AWS Partner Network (APN) and a milestone achieved by only a select group of partners across Australia and New Zealand.  This recognition reflects...

10 December, 2025 /

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Cloudflare Dev Workshop 2020 In mid-February, I had the privilege to attend the first Melbourne Cloudflare dev event. This was just one of a series of sessions they ran across the country to reach out to developers and help educate people around their thinking and the...

04 March, 2020 /

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No food reviews here I'm afraid

This year I was incredibly lucky to score a coveted ticket to YOW! in beautiful Melbourne. I was also asked to be a track host for a couple of sessions, so that was quite an honour too. This post is a whirlwind wrap-up of the conference, and only includes my favourite talks from the two day event. If you're hoping to hear detailed reviews on how the coffee/food/WiFi/venue was, then you'll be greatly disappointed (it was all great BTW).
01 December, 2017 /

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5 tips on form design to improve your relationship with users

Filling in a form online is one of the most important points of interaction a user has with an organisation. And we interact with them often. We fill in tax forms, grant applications, make online purchases or sign up to dating sites. Forms can be the first step in a relationship with an organisation, or the final step in a journey to achieve a goal. For example get a grant, a drivers license or a partner in crime. Sometimes not filling them properly can carry unpleasant consequences like an interrogation by immigration officers at the airport, or your profile on OkCupid matching you with the wrong date.💔
“A form [ ] collects information from at least one party, and delivers it to at least one other party, so a product or service can be provided.”~Jessica Enders
The role of a UX designer is to help create easy, fast and productive form experiences. To entice users to fill in forms. As form design expert Jessica Enders states, designers should “create an optimal user experience, such that the needs of both the users and the owner of the form [organisation that owns the form] are met.”  
02 May, 2017 /

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Or how to keep Groomzilla away

As a UX designer with a background in Law and Visual Communication, I have been solving problems for a while. Yet, little could prepare me for solving a challenge of a different kind: my very own wedding. Well, that is what I thought. My partner is from South Africa. I am Spanish. We met in Dublin, then moved to Melbourne and eventually decided to get married in my hometown in the Canary Islands. The ‘problemo’? Organise an enjoyable multicultural wedding 10,000km away, without breaking the bank or losing my cool.
15 February, 2017 /

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I have been working on a project that is a real-estate web portal. One of the main features of the portal is maps. You can search for a property on the map using certain criteria. You can see what other objects - supermarkets, hospitals, kindergartens - are located near it, or you can drill into information about specific properties. Initially I choose to use OpenStreetMap to render maps, the main reason being the level of detail that it provides. For instance, you can see things like factories, industrial zones, suburb borders, schools, etc. This information is quite important when you are looking for a new place to live. But (and there's always a 'but'), I ran into a problem when I got my first Retina MacBook Pro. Maps looked a bit blurry on it. It turned out that the problem was the Retina (hi-res) display. What I needed was special tiles that rendered with a bigger scale factor to make them sharper. I was looking for a free, ready-to-use solution, but couldn't find one. There are some commercial projects that you can use, but they cost money, which we didn't really have for that project. Furthermore, I needed to keep tile format the same so I don't need to make any modifications on front end. Fortunately, OpenStreetMap not only serves up map tiles, but gives you access to the huge geo database underneath as well. So, I decided to render my own tiles from this database. In this article I'll present my solution. Importantly, this solution will use Docker to build and run. Using Docker helps avoid problems running shared libraries across different platforms, because most of the tools in that area written with C++. The hope is that you'll be able to easily setup this solution in your own environment.
30 December, 2016 /

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  Shine's very own Pablo Caif will be rocking the stage at the very first YOW! Data conference in Sydney. The conference will be running over two days (22-23 Sep) and is focused big data, analytics, and machine learning. Pablo will give his presentation on Google BigQuery,...

31 August, 2016 /

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Every couple of months I'm in a meeting where a couple of developers start arguing about which HTTP status codes to use in their RESTful API, or where they decide to not use HTTP status codes at all and instead layer their own error-code system on top of HTTP.

In my experience, HTTP status codes are more than adequate for communicating from servers to clients. Furthermore, it's preferable to stick with this standard, because that's what most client and server-side HTTP libraries are used to dealing with.

When it comes to which status code to use, the truth is that most of the time it doesn't matter, just so long as it falls within the correct range. In this post I'm going to outline what the important ranges are, and when you should use each one.

If you control both the client and server, these guidelines should do just fine. If you're writing a more generic RESTful service where other people are writing the clients, you may have to be a bit more nuanced. Either way, this rule-of-thumb is a good starting point to work towards the simplest solution possible for your particular problem.

03 June, 2016 /

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