Category: Technology

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Takeaways from WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2022

My takeaways from WeAreDevelopers

AI development helpers

GitHub announced copilot, a plug-in to your IDE which will predict and write code for you. They predict this could save a developer unto 40% on common code problems, and in the next 5 years could effectively write 80%.

The other speakers didn’t really align with this but its an interesting concept, if we’re all resolving the same types of issues, it doesn’t take long before there is a design pattern or best practise to develop the solution – the complexity is making those design patterns work with our codebase.

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Is it me or has Apple missed some key use cases for their continuity camera feature in OS Ventura and ios16?

Apple presented yesterday at WWDC22 their new continuity feature, which allows you to use an iPhone as a wireless webcam.

Image source: Apple.

We all know MacBook’s dont have the best front facing camera (2MP), they’re fine but not ground breaking – they may be good for light balance but they’re easily overshadowed by the iPhone rear facing cameras. This looks nice, but I can’t see myself strapping my phone to my MacBook just to increase quality any time soon. Although their top down desk view (for desktops was quite neat though)

What apple missed.

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Unlock the potential in your existing database with a customer data platform and rebalance your google ad spend.

Google Ads is an effective way of acquiring customers, but businesses often forget that they have great potential in the data they already have. Google has become the Amazon of marketing, it’s the go to place to capture leads and increase sales. More Ads = More leads = More conversions = More Sales.

Where this is effective, it bears a cost. As more agencies compete, the cost per click increases for the same consumer, the conversion drops, and the only real winner is Google.

With an average cost per acquisition of £50+, there are other ways to increase sales.

Customer Data Platforms. Know your customer.

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Travel agencies use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to save money

Travel agents often book outside of the corporate booking engine. A good example of this is Ryanair or easyJet flights, and other tour operators or dmcs, who may give negotiated rates over the phone.

These manually booked elements, bear risks. Risk of typos, date errors, risk of incorrect costs. If left un-checked these bear a liability to travel agencies.

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Deliver innovation via micro services orchestration.

Traditional applications can be monolithic beasts with APIs as the final layer These services present a prescribed flow are often inflexible and were built to do a specific purpose.

Traditional applications are usually object oriented with a series of services being called internally, and eventually rendered as a soap/rest API. Quite often with all functions being within a single code repo.

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When SaaS providers hike their prices.

OpenVPN has been my goto appliance for SSL VPN connections for Devops accessing cloud services, especially as AWS doesn’t have its own SSL VPN gateway!

Open VPN provides a good UI and client tools. Until recently I’ve been happy to pay for its annual licence fee as it offered good value, but earlier this year they changed their model and increased their prices by 400% (oh wait thats before discount, its ONLY increased by 229%).

Last year an annual 10 user licence cost $180

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How to wifi enable a Zebra USB label printer.

Zebra printers are one of the most popular label printers, also the printer recommended by Royal Mail Click and Drop (which links to Shopify). For new sign ups Royal mail offer a £150 Zebra GK420D printer which is a great deal but it isn’t a wifi printer (it is usb, serial or parallel). Network versions are available but are about £200 more.

Using a zebra printer wired is fine, but its a bit messy being tied to a cable in 2021! It would be much more convenient if it was wireless.

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