I recently attended a Secure Code Training course hosted by PrivSec Consulting. The course broadly followed the OWASP Top Ten, representing the most critical security risks to web applications.

Once upon a time—well, in a land of myth and melodrama—a young chap named Icarus got the ultimate upgrade: wings. Handcrafted by his ever-wise (and occasionally overly ambitious) father, Daedalus, these wings were a marvel of ancient engineering, crafted from feathers and wax. Icarus, thrilled by his newfound ability to defy gravity, soared into the sky with the enthusiasm of a kid on a sugar rush.

Recently, during a casual conversation over drinkies, I was discussing our company's plans to continue working with Riki Consultancy Ltd next year as part of our Te Tiriti strategy. Someone asked why we were still bothering, especially since under the current government it was no longer an edict—in fact, quite the opposite. My response was simple: we never undertook this journey because of an edict from anyone; we undertook it because it aligned with our values as a company. It was, and remains, the right thing to do.

It's an incredibly exciting time to be creating software. Never before has it been faster to produce mockups or cheaper to build prototypes. If you have software you want to build, there's no better time than now. The accessibility of development tools and resources has lowered barriers, empowering both newcomers and seasoned entrepreneurs to bring innovative ideas to life swiftly.

In my role Abletech I've spent the last few months preparing software proposals, RFIs and RFPs and I'm left feeling reflective about the state of the software market. My overwhelming urge is to do the rounds of offices of tech purchasers giving out hugs.

I've launched a podcast! Well, kind of...

I came across a post on the socials during a doom scrolling session the other night. Picture below for eventual context. The author had been to a talk by a LinkedIn company exe (I think) and posted their key takeaways from the talk, which really resonated.

As the dust settles on the CrowdStrike event, it highlights the juxtaposition of combating security issues with both third party Agents / automated software update systems and trying to keep our servers patched up and secure. What can we do to prevent this type of attack?

Dive into our exploration of regular expressions, where we unveil practical insights on enhancing readability and maintainability through the use of multi-line options and named captures. This post draws on our firsthand experience to present tangible examples and a step-by-step guide on applying these techniques effectively. Perfect for those looking to streamline their coding practices.

AEDLocations empowers its users to be potential life savers. The App works using a location database with over 17,000 defibrillator locations.

OpenAI's completion API opens up endless possibilities to integrate powerful analysis of text based data and convert it to a structure response suitable for processing by your application. We have recently had a number of examples where we can leverage this technology. One task was to determine the sentiment of someones comment before displaying that comment on a public website.

The UX service at Abletech is growing! After a year of UX services at Abletech, we'd like to share our 5 top learnings.

New to CloudWatch Logs Insights, or want a quick run through of what it can do? I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Insights, and you might be too.

Most of us are onboard with the fact that humans have been overconsuming the earth's resources at an unsustainable rate. Action from a global, government, and local government level is still unsatisfactory. Everyone needs to start doing their bit, and hopefully each little bit adds up and makes a big difference.

In April 2022 we checked in with the team to find out how connected they feel to the Abletech values and ask if they were empowered to live them each day at Abletech. This blog is a summary of the results from the April survey.

On the early mornings of 26th and 27th April (4am NZ time) members of the developer teams from Abletech and Addressfinder attended the [Devs For Ukraine](https://www.devsforukraine.io/) Conference, a free, online engineering conference with the goal to raise funds and provide support to Ukraine.

In 2021, our CEO Michelle Harvey called for more diversity in tech workplaces. Learn about how our partnership with TupuToa brought this to life.

The following post will explain how you can build a simple party management and team service complete with relationship graph, access control and permissions in less than a day. We’ll be using a tool called Hasura with data stored in a Postgres database.

Navigating the choices for building front ends can be daunting. Like everything technology based, you are faced with a bunch of technology choices and tradeoffs. This article attempts to distill your app development options and outline the various pros and cons.

Content Management Systems seem to be a hot topic at the moment. We have been building varying solutions for several clients with integrated CMS systems, including our very own websites abletech.nz and addressfinder.nz. Our personal experience sees us on a three to five year lifecycle with CMS’s. Abletech went from WordPress, to BlogSpot, to Tumblr, to Medium, and now to Strapi over the course of 16 years! This article outlines some of our learnings, why we keep changing, and what we are really after from our CMS.

JAMstack with Next.js, Netlify and Prismic CMS

JAMstack with Next.js, Netlify and Prismic CMS

JAMstack with Next.js, Netlify and Prismic CMS

A client recently requested to add the functionality to be able to accept credit card payments within a Rails application that we were building. Specifically, they wanted users to be able to purchase vouchers using credit card payments and pass on any processing fees. Once the payment was complete, the transaction had to be recorded within the app and an email needed to be sent out to both the purchaser and the giftee. Stripe came into the picture then.