Shine Technologies has been awarded as one of three finalists in Coles IT Vendor Awards 2012, which recognises excellence amongst the companies supplying hardware, software and services to Coles.

Shine was nominated for its role in the flybuys re-launch of April 2012. This was a major Coles initiaive that gained Australia-wide exposure through all media channels. A key portion of the initiative was the software services that powered the website, the call centre and other processing. Prior to the re-launch, there were 3.8 million page views a month for the flybuys website. In the month after re-launch, there were 40.3 million page views – an order of magnitude increase. This is but one measure of many that highlight the massive nature of the re-launch.

“In terms of profile, it is fair to say that this was likely the highest profile website launch in Australia for this year”, said Mark Johnson, Principal of Shine Technologies. “To ensure that the launch was a success, the solution needed to be fast, reliable and delivered on time.”

The flybuys relaunch was led by Roger Sniezek, General Manager of Loyalty, CRM and flybuys at Coles. “We needed to deliver a very large program of work in tight time frames. Using an agile approach, Coles and Shine worked together to hone the user experience and deliver outstanding system performance. Shine really committed to the overall team effort and helped us achieve a fantastic outcome”, said Roger.

Shine Technologies provided the core software development expertise that delivered an innovative and highly critical solution in a matter of months. Although the websites are a highly visible portion of the work, Shine Technologies was also responsible for diverse components such as the Call Centre screens, IVR web services, integration to new partners such as Webjet, AGL and Telstra, as well as integration to internal systems. These many and diverse changes were all delivered on time and tested under extremely tight time frames.

The solution provided through collaboration between Shine Technologies and other internal groups provided an optimized solution that handled load, failover, performance and usability as a seamless solution. “Conversion rates were extremely high, and feedback from the process was extremely positive”, said Mark. “In particular, the performance and ease of use of the my5 selection is something of which we are extremely proud”.

Shine Principal Mark Johnson with co-finalist John Bearsley from JDS

As an Amazon Partner Shine Technologies is proud to become Silver Sponsor for the AWS Customer Appreciation Day held at The Westin, Sydney, Australia, on 13 November 2012.

AWS Customer Appreciation Day is a FREE, half day interactive seminar that is designed for business and technical leaders, and IT Professionals to come together and learn about the latest AWS Cloud technologies and strategies that customers are using today in Australia and New Zealand. For more information and to sign up please visit http://aws.amazon.com/apac/cad-anz/

Shine’s Graham Polley has been featured on the Google Cloud Platform Blog talking about his experiences with Google BigQuery.

In the post Graham discusses how he was able to stream massive amounts of data into BigQuery for a customer, and then query it with a SQL-like interface.

Check it out if you want to learn more!

Shine are delighted to announce that our very own Pablo Caif, and Graham Polley have both been nominated to become part of the Google Developer Expert program!

Becoming an expert, means undergoing a stringent evaluation and interview process, as well as being nominated by a Google employee, authorised by the Google Developers team, and all based on the special contribution they make to their field.

If you’ve been following our blog, then you’ll know that the guys have been doing some awesome work for our client Telstra using the Google Cloud Platform. In particular, they’ve been building scalable big data solutions using bleeding edge technology tools like BigQuery and Dataflow. In addition to building these cool solutions, they’ve both been blogging, and giving talks on their experiences.

The Dataflow engineering team decided it was high time that both Pablo and Graham should be acknowledged for their contribution to the Google cloud platform, and decided to nominate both of them. Their nominations have been submitted for the Cloud Platform category, which will in fact make them the first developer experts in that category in Australia! WOW!

We’d like to wish Graham and Pablo all the best with their application, and hopefully they’ll be awarded the braggable title of ‘Google Developer Expert’ in the not so distant future!

You may have already read our previous post here about Shine’s Pablo Caif & Graham Polley being nominated to become ‘Google Developer Experts‘ (GDE).

Well, today Shine are proud to announce that both guys have been officially awarded the braggable title of GDE, and we’d like to congratulate them on this mighty big achievement!

Becoming an expert, meant undergoing a stringent evaluation and interview process, as well as being nominated by a Google employee, authorised by the Google Developers team, and all based on the special contribution they make to their field.

Their acceptance to the program makes them only the second and third GDEs in Australia. AWESOME! You can check out Pablo’s official profile here, and Graham’s here. Once again, congrats to you both!

Shine is extremely proud to announce that Pablo Caif has been invited to present at GCP Next 2016, which is Google’s largest annual cloud platform event held in San Francisco.

Pablo will be presenting on the work Shine have done for Telstra, which involves building solutions on GCP to manage and analyse their massive datasets. More specifically, the talk will focus around Google’s two core big data products – BigQuery & Cloud Dataflow.

Pablo will be presenting on Thursday 24th March in the ‘Data & Analytics’ track. Be sure to pop by and say “g’day” if you are going to the event! You can find more information about GCP Next 2016 here.

Shine’s Gareth Jones has been accepted to give a talk at YOW! Connected 2016 – Mobile & Internet of Things! His talk, titled ”Progressive Web Apps: What Has The Web Ever Done For Us?“, will take a look at what some believe to be the future of mobile development.

YOW! Connected 2016 will be on in Melbourne from the 5th-6th October. You can catch more details of Gareth’s talk (and his awesome bio!) over here.

Shine’s Technical Excellence Leadership Group (TEL) has had a stellar year! In this post we’ve pulled together our top picks from 2016 that we think deserve a special shout out before the year comes to a close. But first, a quick recap on what the TEL group actually is.

TEL was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. TEL is allocated a yearly budget from the super-duper generous Shine directors, and the members of the TEL group are put in charge of overseeing how it is spent.

The budget comprises two parts: money and time. The monetary portion of the budget goes to prizes and bonuses for producing material. The time portion is for staff to draw upon to get away from their day-to-day work commitments and to produce their material. So, now that you know what TEL is all about, let’s have a look at the highlight reel from 2016 shall we?

SELECT highlight FROM 'TEL.highlights' ORDER BY date ASC:

• Recognition: Shine boasts the only two official Google Developer Experts for cloud in the whole of Australia. Graham Polley and Pablo Caif were interviewed at the start of the year for the official Google Cloud Platform Podcast (episode #10). Never has a podcast had such an eclectic mix of accents, and been so hard to decipher. It’s still worth a listen nevertheless. Trust us. Really. Go on.

• Local meetup talk: Christian Catchpole was invited to give a talk about his homegrown robot that he has built using a Raspberry-Pi at the January MelbJVM meetup in Melbourne. You can see it in full action right here. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming..

• Blog: Pablo Caif wrote a cracking blog on Swift that continues to get a lot of attention even though it was written almost a year ago. All hail our new Apple overlords!

• Conference presentation: Pablo Caif (yes, him again) presented at GCPNext 2016 (Google’s annual cloud event) in San Francisco on the exciting big data work we do at Telstra using BigQuery, Dataflow and PubSub.

• Local meetup talk: Dmitry Pokidov spoke about the Angular2 roadmap at Melbourne’s local Angular meetup. Isn’t there a newer/better/hipster’er frontend framework out by now though? Surely – it has been more than a few months.

• Recognition: Shine hosted a Digital Leaders Breakfast at our brand new HQ office in Melbourne. Telstra’s Jeff Mentiplay did a lot of hand waving, and remarked several times on how good the food was. Thanks Jeff!

• Blog: Ben Teese broke character and ruffled his feathers when he blogged about the importance of picking the correct HTTP status codes. His conclusion was that everyone should just use HTTP code 418 for everything.

• Blog: Gareth Jones made some enemies at AWS when he blogged about moving massive amounts of data from EC2 instances to Google BigQuery for analysis – which also included a tip for saving AWS egress charges by using compression!

• Local meetup talk: James Sinclair presented the AWS meetup in Melbourne on CloudFormation Change Sets. Shame the demo gremlins showed up right at the end. But James did make sure to inform everyone that he got it working on the train home. We’re still waiting on proof of that James! PROOF!

• Blog: Gareth Jones came close to getting fired for racking up a massive bill in Google BigQuery when he wrote THE.WORST.PYTHON script ever. But, we still love him at Shine.

• Conference presentation: Gareth Jones (uh, not again) presented on PWAs at YOW! Connected 2016 (Mobile & IOT). Surely, the coveted prize of best talk title must be awarded to him – “Progressive Web Apps: What Has The Web Ever Done For Us?“ (I’ll just leave this here for our iGeneration readers who are scratching their heads right now).

• Conference presentation: Pablo Caif rocked the stage at the very first YOW! Data conference in Sydney. He spoke about Google BigQuery, and really emphasised how much better he thinks working on the Google stack is than working on the Apple one. Hear, hear!

• Hackathon: Several Shiners participated in a month long hackathon at the Adobe Marketing Cloud – Community Expo. Team 1 (Michael Leroy, Arthur Cavallari, Chris Rzepa & Ryan Siebert) built “Pokemon Go Lure Management on AEM“. Team two’s (Cliff Subagio, Michael Diender, & Stephen Shim) topic was “Building An AEM API Clients Ecosystem“. Great hacking guys!

• Conference presentation: Michael Leroy (our AEM gun) presented at the Adobe Source Event in Sydney – not once, but TWICE! How he managed to get the energy to do both still baffles us. Most presenters know that doing just one talk is exhausting enough.

• Hackathon: Cliff Subagio, Stephen Shim and Michael Diender got busy writing serverless AWS chatbots for the AWS Serverless Chatbot Hackathon: /greatWork Cliff|Stephen|Michael

• Blog: Chris Rzepa wrote a top notch blog post on how to ease the pain when you need to create rich email templates. Chris also gets the award for best featured image. How awesome is that octopus huh?

• Blog:  Darren Cibis’ blog post on the battle between AWS Athena -vs- BigQuery created a lot of chatter in both the AWS and Google camps. So much so in fact, that the GM over at AWS for Athena & EMR emailed him directly about his post. That’s what TEL is all about. Great work Darren!

• Recognition: Google posted an article with their top-10 list of Google BigQuery user experiences for 2016. In it, two blogs from Graham Polley made the cut (number 2 & 7). Yes we know, Graham’s such a Google fan boy!

If that’s got your mouth watering, then just wait for 2017!

The TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community.  Here’s the latest roundup:

Blogs:

• Darren Cibis blogged about Amazon’s Athena product and compared it to Google’s BigQuery. This post received quite a lot of attention – so much so, that the product managers for both AWS and Google contacted him directly to chat about his findings.

• Graham Polley thought it would be interesting to analyse all the public Stack Overflow data that’s available in BigQuery, and then run sentiment analysis on comments made by posters – spoiler – Python developers are the friendliest bunch of folks on Stack Overflow.

• Dmitry Pokidov wrote a post on generating high-res maps using Mapnik & Docker. This is a great read if you’re also a Macbook Retina display user – and also a Docker lover!

• Fabricio Milone blogged about using AKKA in highly concurrent Java applications.  Building concurrency into any application has always been a complex task – especially in Java (“We’ve got DEADLOCK people!“) – but the AKKA framework helps to makes it easier and abstracts away a lot of the gnarly complexities.

• Graham Polley wanted to do something interesting on his lunch break, so he decided to load all of the publicly available WSPR data into BigQuery – 8 years worth in just 40 minutes! This made fellow Shiner Aaron Brown very happy indeed.

• Michael Leroy detailed how to get rid of long and ugly URLs in AEM.  This is a tricky topic that needs some thought upfront – or else it can get very unruly, very quickly!

• Dmitry Pokidov blogged about how to write safer TypeScript code using strict null checks and type guards. Is it really possible to write safe JavaScript?

• Mario Quintana used his awesome UX skills to help plan his recent wedding. Blog title of the year clearly must go to Mario’s blog here.

Local Meetups:

• Graham Polley, was selected to speak at the 2016 Sydney Devfest where he gave a talk on Google BigQuery, and did a demo of query smashing 100 billion rows (10TB) in 40 seconds!

• Ben Teese did a talk at MelbJS on the recently-released ‘Prettier‘ JS formatting tool, but mostly he just ranted about how code formatting really doesn’t matter that much – to the degree that not only should you let a computer format your code for you, but you should let the computer decide what format to use.

• Ben Teese gave a presentation on React Router v4 at the React Melbourne meetup. Recently, it has gone from alpha into beta, which means that the API has now stabilised. Ben created a screen recording that you can check out here.

• Peter Fuggle managed to wrangle the Melbourne Docker meetup group to the Shine offices for a great Docker meetup. I think it’s safe to say that everyone enjoyed the office view – and the talks of course

• Graham Polley presented at the GDG (Google Developer Group) meetup in Feb, and spoke about Google’s swanky new Cloud Vision API, which uses advanced ML under the hood. He also demoed the API working on his Raspberry-Pi. Shine also hosted the Jan GDG meetup.

Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.

Blogs:

• Gareth Jones hates cron jobs. So he ditched them for a recent client project, and used Google’s new Cloud Functions (their version of AWS Lambdas) to trigger his Dataflow pipelines instead. You can read all about it here.

• Darren Cibis attended his first conference in San Francisco. It was Google’s annual cloud event, GCPNext 2017. There were a lot of exciting announcements for Google Cloud, although the keynote on day one was deemed a big dud! You can read all about Darren’s experience at GCPNext 2017 here.

Local Meetups:

• Shine hosted the March Melbourne Google Developers Group (GDG) meet up at our offices in Melbourne CBD. It was one of the biggest turn outs to date, boasting talks on AI/ML, Google Design Sprints, and Android O.

Other Interesting Stuff:

• On March 30th, Google held their ‘Cloud OnBoard‘ event at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre with over 500 attendees turning up on the day! The event was free full-day instructor-led enablement and training session that provided folks with a step-by-step technical introduction to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Shine are an official GCP partner, and as such, we were invited to have a booth at the event for the day. Shiners Mark Johnson, Cam Stirling, and Graham Polley went along and showcased some of the awesome work we’ve done on Google Cloud Platform for some of our clients, including a real-time Twitter sentiment analysis application using Kubernetes,  Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Natural Language API, BigQuery and Data Studio (shout out to the fine folks at Data  Runs Deep for their help with the Twitter dashboard!).

Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.

Blogs:

• Aaron Brown confessed to being an amateur radio geek by writing a post on how he used Google’s BigQuery to analyse 8+ years of WSPR data.

• Resident AEM gun, Michael Leroy, blogged about his first impressions of AEM 6.3, calling out the good and not so good things about it.

• Again, another great blog post title from Mario Quintana – “It’s not you, it’s your form“. This post outlines five tips for improving form design.

• Nic Hobbs recently whizzed up to Sydney, and attended the 2017 AWS Sydney Partner day & Summit. Here’s a roundup of the event from him. Note: we really do believe him that he went, even though he “forgot” to take a single picture while he was there

Conferences:

• Cliff Subagio likes Jenkins. In fact, he likes it so much that he put a talk proposal in for the Jenkins World Conference 2017 being held in San Francisco. We’re happy to announce that Cliff was accepted, and he’ll be delivering his talk “Bringing Jenkins Remote Access API To The Masses” on August 31st.

Local Meetups:

• Shine hosted the April Melbourne Google Developers Group (GDG) meet up at our offices in Melbourne’s CBD. The night included talks on testing Android apps, and also sneak preview of the upcoming annual Google IO event in Mountain View.

Other Interesting & Cool Things:

• Shine recently undertook a pro bono project for the Queens Fund Victoria. Founded in 1887, they are one of Victoria’s oldest charities, run by women for women. They provide emergency grants for Victorian women and their children, who are suffering from financial distress. Shine happily offered to rebuild their backend web portal to make it easier for the social workers to submit applications on behalf of the women in need. The entire solution was rebuilt using Google Cloud Platform, in particular using Google App Engine, and Cloud SQL. Massive shout out to all the team involved in this incredibly inspiring project.

• Shiners Peter Fuggle & Nick Freemantle hosted a Docker workshop for students at RMIT last week. The feedback from RMIT and students was super positive, and they have even asked Shine to run another session later in the year. Well done guys!

Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.

Blogs:

• Scott Goldie is desperately hoping we get a client that wants to do some Virtual Reality, so much so that he wrote an introduction into the various platforms. Help Scott out, pay him to do the things he plays with for free.
• Graham Polley wrote yet another article about Big Data, this time about the changes you need to make to your code to use Apache Beam – the new API for Google’s Dataflow. Graham goes on a lot about Big Data and never gets invited to parties. These things may be related.
• Matt Gleeson wrote about Ampersand.js – because the world loves Javascript frameworks. By the time you read this, it’s probably not fashionable any more. Matt doesn’t care about fashion, he’s above all that sort of thing and so should you be.
• Gareth Jones’ Google Home device wrote a roundup of Google I/O 2017, for which Gareth took the credit. He’s hoping this is a pattern that can be extended to all future work on AI, where he takes credit for the work of machines. He also enjoys referring to himself in the third-person.
• Oh, what a surprise – Graham Polley wrote about Big Data again, this time with a post helping out new Big Query users by explaining some of the things that might not be obvious. He loves big data, and he cannot lie.
• Darren Cibis joined in the Big Data party, with an article about partitioning tables in Big Query. He also loves big data, but does get invited to parties. And not just Big Data parties.

Conferences:

• Ben Teese, who is almost six metres tall when not in human form, got accepted to present at Web Directions Code 2017, in Melbourne on August 3 & 4. He’ll be talking about static type checkers for Javascript. You should go, it’ll be great.

Local Meetups:

• Shine sponsored the Melbourne Google Developer Group’s Google I/O Extended event where speakers covered the major announcements from Google’s big developer conference.

Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.

Blogs:

• Daniel Syme, whose family famously invented the letter “L” in 1826, wrote about “Extending React’s Container/Presentation Pattern To Share Business Logic Between Apps” – demonstrating that his technical knowledge is only surpassed by his inability to write a pithy title. (Pithy means “terse and vigorously expressive”, it’s not rude. Honestly, you people.)
• Chaise Hocking, who (despite the name) has never been a character in an American teen drama series about angsty werewolves that are having trouble fitting in at school, told us all about “Universal Links – A Few Things To Be Prepared For”. This is a man that will happily leave his prepositions stranded. Utterly ruthless.
• Christian Catchpole – a name that always makes us think of Mr Claypole from the children’s TV programme Rentaghost. We have been assured that Mr Catchpole is not related, and is also not a ghost. For his blog post, “DevOps Talks Conference, 2017” (pithy af, btw), he channelled the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson and wrote a gonzo undercover exposé of the seedy world of DevOps. (Note that this has nothing do with Gonzo from the Muppets, which I know you were thinking about).

Presentations:

• Suken Shah, creator of Kellog’s Corn Flakes and the concept of ennui, gave a lightning talk about Stack Driver at the June GDG Melbourne Meetup. We are pretty sure he won’t have said that Stack Driver sucks for creating alerts, because he’s very polite.

Upcoming Presentations:

• Darren Cibis, from Channel Ten’s The Bachelor, and Graham “I love big data” Polley will be educating the peasants at the July GDG Melbourne Meetup on July 26. Darren will sing a duet with his Google Home device, and Graham will talk about Google’s Video Intelligence service – extracting metadata from his specialist video collection.
• Ben Teese, human avatar of Elder God Cthulhu (who lies dreaming in R’lyeh), will be commanding you to use static type checkers in Javascript at Webdirections Code on August 3. Obey him, or eternal torment awaits.
• Cliff Subagio translates early Mesopotamian clay tablets in his spare time (“you haven’t really read the Epic of Gilgamesh until you’ve read it in the original, you miss all the jokes”). He’ll be speaking at Jenkins World on August 31. It’s in San Francisco, so start being nice to your boss now.
• To celebrate the launch of the Sydney region for Google Cloud, Shine is hosting the mother of all meetups on August 9. It’s an epic, three-hour, techfest with several Google experts presenting about Dataflow, Machine Learning APIs, BigQuery and Tensorflow. Bring a soft cushion and a stack of “mind blown” gifs to live-tweet.
• Shine is sponsoring DojoCon Australia 2017, which takes place on September 25 in Perth. So now you have a reason to go to Perth. Mix with the people that help make the Coder Dojos around the country so special.

Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.

Blogs:

• One blog to rule them all this month: “Java 9 – Project Jigsaw” by Neil Henry, lifting the lid on some module loading controversy in everyone’s favourite legacy language. Neil Henry is no stranger to controversy himself, being the major driving force behind the “No Straddling South Of Dollis Hill” rule introduced to competition Mornington Crescent in 2005.

Presentations:

• Ben Teese added to the souls pledged to His Eternal Crusade, their worship freely given upon meeting His terrible gaze at Web Directions Code on Aug 3-4. In exchange for ancient secrets of Type Checking in Javascript that humans were never meant to know, their life force was added to His own, and He will soon be unstoppable.
• The inaugural GDG Cloud Melbourne Meetup was a triumph. I’m making a note here: huge success. Three great speakers from Google, and unfortunately Gareth from Shine. 
• I mean, sure, he’s really ridiculously good-looking. And the presentation was awesome, despite some technical difficulties. But he’s no Graham Polley. (Photo courtesy of GDG Cloud Melbourne on Twitter)
• Speaking of Graham Polley, noted lover of Big Data and bog-snorkelling champion, he presented a quick talk on Google’s new Video Intelligence API at the July GDG Melbourne meetup.

Upcoming Presentations:

• Suken Shah, prophesied to be the only one able to stop Ben Teese’s eventual enslavement of Earth’s people, will be presenting at the GDG Cloud Melbourne Meetup in September. Sign up, and heed his wisdom. It’ll mostly be about Serverless Microservices in App Engine, but you never know – this may be your only chance to save yourself. Also speaking at the event will be Google’s Scott Thomson (no known prophecies concern him). If you feel like speaking at an upcoming GDG Cloud Melbourne session, fill in this form.
• Suken Shah’s twin brother, confusingly also named Suken Shah, will be presenting at the Melbourne JVM meetup on September 6. This will be a talk about Java 9 compilation – how to get some performance optimisations out of it.
• Cliff Subagio, who likes to whittle his own integrated circuits from rocks he finds on the beach, will be speaking at Jenkins World, in San Francisco at the end of August. Tickets are almost sold out, so steal the company credit card quickly.
• DevFest Melbourne 2017 will take place on October 21. Graham Polley will be presenting, but don’t let that put you off – there are some other speakers that are really good.
• It’s a shame that Gareth Jones isn’t presenting, he’s so dreamy.

Read More TEL Newsletter – October 2017

Read More TEL Newsletter – December 2017

Read More TEL Newsletter – February 2018

Read More TEL Newsletter – June 2018

Read More TEL Newsletter – July 2018

Read More TEL Newsletter – October 2018