Braden Alsford

At the start of this week I did a quick job search on SEEK to see the number of design roles out there in Australia. 873 Compare that to Software Engineering roles on SEEK alone, which had around 2750. I’ve spoken to a number of design leaders and here’s a few reasons why we may be seeing these numbers: 🎩For some companies, design is seen as a luxury 💻It’s much harder for designers to do their job when there’s a ton of technical debt to fix Unfortunately, I don’t forsee things rebalancing for another few years. If you’re a job hunter in design right now, the best thing you can do is try and stand out. Drop me a message if you’re looking for some tips. #latitudeit #uxui #jobs

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📉 Unemployment Rate 4.0% in May 📉 The latest report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed Australia's unemployment rate has dropped to 4.0%, a significant improvement from 4.6% this time last year. Generally, the IT sector has been resilient, with the demand for tech talent remaining. What does this mean for you? 🟪Employers: Talent retention remains a strong focus for businesses as we approach the end of the financial year. Many companies are facing budget constraints, impacting their hiring plans. This makes retaining top talent more critical than ever. We can help you with strategies to keep your business moving forward. 🟪Job Seekers: While the job market is showcasing some exceptional opportunities, it's also competitive with many skilled candidates available. This is a great time to leverage our expertise to find the right opportunity that matches your skills and career goals. Our commitment at Tech & Data People is to bridge the gap between exceptional talent and forward-thinking companies. Whether its talent attraction or retention, reach out to learn more about how we can support your staffing strategies, positioning you for success in the current market. #TechandDataPeople #TDP #EmploymentTrends #TechRecruitment #PeopleOverPixels

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Over half a million UniSuper members recently experienced a week-long outage due to a rare Google Cloud misconfiguration that led to the complete deletion of UniSuper’s cloud account. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian have confirmed that no cyber-attack or data breach occurred. Key Takeaways: • Redundancy is Crucial: Ensure backups across multiple clouds or on-premise to prevent single points of failure. • Cloud Best Practices: Regular backups, geographic redundancy, and disaster recovery plans are essential. Thanks to backups with another provider, UniSuper swiftly restored services, minimizing data loss. This incident underscores the importance of robust cloud strategies to handle unexpected disruptions and avoid significant data loss. Source: https://lnkd.in/ewfEd3hw #CyberSecurity #CloudComputing #DataProtection #UniSuper #GoogleCloud #BestPractices #BackupStrategy

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It was a pleasure to attend the first Open Source Data Infrastructure meetup last night in Auckland hosted by Aiven. Thanks to Dana Garifullina, I learned a lot about the benefits and inner workings of tiered storage for Kafka and how it is a great way to offload some of your Kafka storage costs onto cloud storage like S3 or Azure Blob Storage. It seems to be one of the tweaks that has a massive payoff with little to no downside. I also really enjoyed 🐯 James Sewell's from Timescale comments about reducing technical complexity by using Postgres for everything. One point that really struck a chord with me was, "Optimize for your requirements and never because you can." It's a reminder that optimization should serve real needs, not just be a technical exercise. Most users don't need sub-microsecond response times. The end user won't recognize a query running 0.1 or even 1 second faster, but they will realize a new feature they wanted has been implemented. Use your time wisely on things that truly affect your user.

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Move fast or it's gone soon

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CFP and early bird ticket is open for NZ Tech Rally 2024! Our team felt that it's important to acknowledge the things that are happening in our software industry, and learn from those working through it. Hence the somewhat spicy theme. It's something I'm personally grappling with. I wasn't made redundant, but I know people who have. I've also been personally impacted by constant restructures and uncertainties. NZ Tech Rally team found ourselves wondering: - Why all the constant restructures, especially after redundancies? - Is this experience different in Kiwi organisations compared to overseas? - How have you adapted with less? - What helped you through these changes? - Does this change the way you code or design your software? - How do you prevent degraded experience for your users through all this? - What was it like to be a manager who had to let your software people go while keeping the lights on? - Any impact on DEI? - What does your team look like today? - What could we have done different? - What can we do to prepare for that next round of sweeping changes? So many questions. So many of you have stories and lessons to share. I'd love to hear your takes from all angles: managing yourself, managing product, managing team, managing codebases, managing infrastructure, serving customers, etc. Lets rally the whole software team to discuss how to move forward with hope. Reach out to me, Aaron Hodder, or Camy Bhandari directly if you want to chat through your talk idea! #NZTechRally2024 #Conference #CFP #CallForProposals

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Let's talk The Composable Architecture (TCA) I've still seen relatively few Australian businesses adopt this new technology since being here but it's definitely one that I think will be more widely implemented in the future. The most common architectural pattern still being used is without a doubt MVVM. Some companies might have MVC still in use and I have seen the odd one make the use of VIPER. Most if not all companies are now moving towards using SwiftUI, and The Composable Architecture unlocks some incredible ways to perform snapshot testing in SwiftUI. Why have more businesses not already implemented TCA? Articles in the comments for those who want to read more about it #SwiftUI #Swift #TCA #TheComposableArchitecture #iOS #Mobile

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There has been a lot of hype around the Rust programming language. Most articles and blogs I read are heavy on promises, and a little light on testing. I’ve done a simple comparison between a lambda written in Python vs the same lambda written in Rust. Both use the official AWS SDKs. Boto3 is well established but the Rust SDK is new. The official release was about 8 months ago at reinvent. I’ve load tested both using K6. Why? Well, because I want to see for myself if I really do get the 8x improvement in performance and equivalent reduction in cost that people promote. What were the results? Come along and find out! https://lnkd.in/gfzVfDXY

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It's a different world today to the Australian (and global) market for software engineers 18 months ago, according to Indeed. Anecdotally this lines up with my experience in-market for the change in applicant volume (up), quality (up) and salary expectations (down) for open software product roles over the last 18 months. It'll bounce back for sure, but I'm guessing it's going to remain an employer-favoured market for a while yet. Source: https://lnkd.in/gXj5b--6

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It’s a freezing cold Saturday in Melbourne and a great day to be indoors. I rarely get time to tinker with my side-hobby iOS development. Today I’ve been looking at the Apple Intelligence API and it’s got me thinking about the [real] impacts AI is likely to have in the next few years. I don’t think many would dispute that social media created a dramatic societal change from about 2013 onward. I’m wondering, is this about to cause another mass psychosocial change? Even as I type this post, there is a little icon tempting me to take the shortcut and ‘Write it with AI’. It’s just too easy. That’s the problem. I’m a busy person. It makes sense to save time right? And who knows, maybe the AI can write it better than me. Well… yes, but that’s not the whole picture. The easy option is addictive. If I use it all the time, I start to rely on it. I bet if I write all my emails and posts for the next 3 months using AI, and then take an AI detox, kicking off that first sentence would be painful. So I’m wondering, if AI raises my productivity while simultaneously eroding my discipline, initiative, creativity and resilience… is it a net zero effect? It’s a bit like exercise… some level of personal effort and resistance is critical to maintaining health. Maybe the key is to use AI to review and enhance my existing work, but not to create the ideas in the first place. Ps. the Apple Intelligence API looks great so far. Lots of ideas are rolling around in my mind.

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TLDR: I built a thing to help invest in property by helping you compare financial metrics on properties, check it out (Currently only Canberra data and still a work in progress); 🙏 Link: https://www.vallu.com.au Over Christmas I started on what I thought would be a quick project, turns out it was not quick... 😴 Over the years I have always felt like investing in property was difficult and the data available was not useful for comparing financial performance. Many people talk about rules like "Rent should be 1% of the price" or "Apartments have worse capital growth than housing". Now while these rules of thumb may generally be true they never felt like they captured the nuance of investing in property and actually helped compare investment options. I'm no expert by any means but I wanted to develop a tool that would make comparing potential purchases easier and empower everyone to make more informed data-driven decisions. At the moment I only have sales data for Canberra but if people find it useful will look to expand it. It is still very much a work in progress and I have a ton of ideas to make it more useful. Reach out and tell me what you think https://www.vallu.com.au

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Australian Property Market Update – May 2024 🏡 Key Takeaways: Australian home values continued to trend higher in April, with CoreLogic’s national Home Value Index (HVI) rising by 0.6%. This marks the 15th month of the current growth cycle, with housing values up 11.1% since the trough in January last year. The preliminary auction clearance rate across the combined capitals was 71.1%. Sydney property prices increased slightly, while Melbourne remained flat. Brisbane property prices rose over the last week. Overall, Australian capital dwelling prices increased by 0.6% over the last month and are now 9.2% higher than a year ago. 📈 Market Outlook: Property prices and rents are likely to keep increasing throughout 2024. The current property cycle remains driven by an undersupply of properties relative to demand. The Reserve Bank Assistant Commissioner highlighted that significant population growth is outpacing new dwelling supply. 📣 Investors, Don’t Miss Out! If you’re an investor looking to make sound investment decisions, get in touch with me. Let’s discuss your options and find the right investment properties together! #RealEstateInvestments #PropertyMarketAnalysis #InvestmentStrategy #PropertyInvestor #AustralianProperty #PropertyNetworking #PropertyProfessionals #PropertyIndustry #PropertyExperts #PropertyConsultant

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Start your Monday off right by buying tickets to our next Melbourne Talent Meetup on May 23rd. 🎟 We’re super excited to have Julian Bright and David Yip, join us to help equip you with some very valuable knowledge that can help you navigate the next few waves of AI advancements in the TA & HR space. 🤖 If you're interested in learning about: • The history of AI and the rise of generative AI - and what it means for teams in the talent space • How AI tools and technologies can help you streamline your workflows • Practical strategies for managing the flood of applications driven by AI-powered job search tools • Tools to help talent teams scale hiring • How we can help the business understand the kind of skills we need in the future • What our teams need to do to upskill for the changing landscape • An outlook of what global innovators are doing ...Then go and reserve your spot via Humanitix. ➡️https://lnkd.in/gPbXnNtE We can’t wait to see you all! 😎 Matt Woodard, Stefan Welack, Caitlin Clements (Fairchild) #talentacquisition #recruiters #humanresources #melbourne #ai

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HealthNow raises $3.4M from revered investors in the ecosystem. It’s a great story emerging because the more successful HealthNow becomes as it scales, the healthier and happier workforces become. If you’re in HR, People and Culture etc (Australia and New Zealand) and looking to enhance your wellness strategy check out HealthNow.

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Thank you, Angelo Gulisano and Nicolò Ferranti, for the Bellissimo “Leveraging Azure Application Insights with Power Apps and Power Automate” session at Coding Night NZ 🤌! We had an incredible session exploring various ways to capture telemetry within Power Apps, both in Canvas and Model-Driven Apps. Nicolò Ferranti delved into Low-Code methods as well as High-Code plugins in C#, demonstrating how to load assemblies into #dataverse to capture events and also a PCF (PowerApps Component Framework) control in ReactJs with monitoring embedded. Angelo Gulisano showcased Power Automate, highlighting its seamless integration with an Azure Function written in NodeJs for capturing telemetry data. All telemetry is available in #azure Application Insights, providing integrated analytics and insights into user flow and app monitoring! A session with lots of great demos! 🎇 🎯 If you missed the session, the recording is available on our YouTube Channel: https://lnkd.in/g4wqTyrG 🎯 Whether you are an experienced #developer with years in the field, a recent graduate embarking on your career, or someone in a career transition, stay tuned for our upcoming events and meetups here: https://lnkd.in/dSbfdZQX #powerplatform #azure #dotnet #reactjs #node #developers #community #meetup #codingnightnz #mvpbuzz #Gratitude #ContinuousLearning #growth #learning #thankyou

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