Services

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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Here in Australia, we do a lot of work on Google Cloud Platform for one of the country’s largest ISPs, Telstra. Most of that work involves building data pipelines and running analytics off the back of them for their Media business unit. As you can well imagine, they generate a huge amount of data on a daily basis. We use tools like BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow and Data Studio to wrangle, manage, and understand that data. On one such project for Telstra, we saw an opportunity to delete three code repositories and finally rid ourselves of some of the headaches associated with maintaining those applications, all the while saving money on the operational costs. We were able to replace the system comprising these repos with two new Google Cloud Platform services: In this blog post, I’ll introduce you to those new services that Google have spun up, and how we were able to use them to replace our legacy applications. Who doesn’t like a good spring clean, huh?
23 January, 2018 /

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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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OK Google, generate a clickbait title for my Google I/O 2017 blog post I've generated a title, Gareth. What would you like to add next? OK Google, I'm a bit jet lagged - remind me what I saw at Google I/O 2017 I would love to help, Gareth, but I'm going to need a little more information. Would you like that information in chronological order, or grouped by topic?
25 May, 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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At Shine we're big fans of Google BigQuery, which is their flagship big data processing SaaS. Load in your data of any size, write some SQL, and smash through datasets in mere seconds. We love it. It's the one true zero-ops model that we're aware of for grinding through big data without the headache of worrying about any infrastructure. It also scales to petabytes. Although we've only got terabytes, but you've got to start somewhere right? If you haven't yet been introduced to the wonderful world of BigQuery, then I suggest you take some time right after this reading this post to go and check it out. Your first 1TB is free anyway. Bargain! Anyway, back to the point of this post. There have been a lot of updates to BigQuery in recent months, both internally and via features, and I wanted to capture them all in a concise blog post. I won't go into great detail on each of them, but rather give a quick summary of each, which will hopefully give readers a good overview of what's been happening with the big Q lately. I've pulled together a lot of this stuff from various Google blog posts, videos, and announcements at GCP Next 2016 etc.
19 August, 2016 /

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