9 blog posts tagged "Operations"

Spend enough time as a software developer, and you learn about the existence and pain of technical debt. Understanding, managing, and communicating technical debt is crucial. It allows us to build more maintainable software, improve our productivity, and even boost team morale. We recently hosted a webinar with one of our software development team leads, Kiersten Nelthorpe, and senior software developer Cody Robertson, where they gave valuable insights and strategies to help you deal with technical debt in your work.

A recent defective update from CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity provider, caused a global outage affecting millions of Windows systems. Oops. The faulty update to CrowdStrike's Falcon software, intended for endpoint detection and response, led to the infamous "blue screen of death" (BSOD) and rendered many systems non-bootable. The widespread disruption primarily impacted large organizations reliant on CrowdStrike's services, sparing home PCs and systems running on Mac and Linux. Like the rest of the world, Smarty employees were also impacted.

I was given the task of setting up a tinc VPN so that we could test performance for comparison against other VPN systems. This task took much longer than it should have. For that reason, I am making this post to help me and others remember how to do it again in the future. Installing tinc is straightforward enough. You can download the latest release and build it or install it from your favorite package manager. The configuration for tinc lives in /etc/tinc. The configuration is what seems to be the hard part of getting tinc to work.

It’s November, and online shopping is ramping up to its climactic end-of-year blitz. www. blackfriday. com estimates that between Thanksgiving and Black Friday of this year, consumers will spend approximately $13 billion (1). That’s great news for your business. But if you don’t have the right tools in place to help you meet that demand, you might be left wishing you had better prepare. Staffing may be one issue for many businesses. According to the US Chamber of Commerce, the wholesale and retail trade industry has experienced the second-highest quit rate of all industries since November 2020(2).

Parcel shipping costs have been rising since 2020. We’ve all seen inflation on the consumer end, whether we’re checking out online or paying at the gas pump. And skyrocketing freight rates have made headlines. Today, we’re going to focus on the impact of the increasing cost of shipping on your business and what you can do about it. But don’t lose hope—while we’re going to explore climbing shipment costs in this article, we’ll also chat about what your business can do to make shipping more efficient.

Typos, typoes or typo's?No matter how you spell the word, typos are a problem. Even the most accurate typist occasionally misspells a word, leaves off a letter at the end, or just types a different word than intended. Typos in a text to your friend aren't a big deal. They'll figure out what you mean using context clues. But in a business data scenario, if you're following the logic of traditional address matching, where an address is either an exact match or not a match, you can't account for different formats or misspellings.

Certain surprises are fun. Finding out the person in front of you at Starbucks paid for your coffee? Java-tastic! Finding out you've been shipping products to addresses that don't exist? That's a postal catastrophe. Luckily, many shipping snafus can be prevented by using address validation software. Address validation (or verification) is the process of checking a mailing address against an authoritative address database. If the address matches an address in the known database, it is marked “valid”—meaning it's real.

In today's digital age, businesses collect vast amounts of data on their customers, including their addresses. However, federal laws are yet to be enacted to protect consumers from businesses that misuse or from hackers who abuse personal data. Consumers looking for protection must, for now, rely on various State legislation and privacy protection laws. Businesses must keep abreast of the multiple laws governing consumer rights and take extra measures to protect consumers' personal information, including address data.

If you’ve decided to embark on a journey of data governance, you’ll want to check out the full ebook “Data Governance: An Executive’s Survival Guide. ” The following is but one chapter of the guide. Tools available for data governanceBy outlining and implementing data quality control guidelines, data governance software helps organizations meet regulatory standards, improve security, and increase employee efficiency. While some software is designed explicitly for data governance, it's also possible to find master data management and data quality software with built-in tools for data governance processes.