15 items tagged ”Operations”

<p>Smarty’s security and confidentiality approach is built around a simple idea: process address data in accordance with customer agreements and relevant privacy requirements, protect it, and limit who (and what) can access it. </p><p>We recognize that you own your compliance requirements, and we’re here to make that easier. Below is a synthesized view of the controls and practices Smarty follows to support compliance, along with details on our Enhanced Data Privacy upgrade, which provides an extra layer of protection for you and your business or organization.

<p>Slack is incredible—until it becomes overwhelming, distracting, and hard to manage. </p><p>Every company eventually reaches that moment when the friendly hum of collaboration turns into a full-blown notification blizzard. </p><p>Messages pile up. </p><p>Channels multiply like rabbits. </p><p>Every ping feels urgent. </p><p>Suddenly, your team’s deep-focus time feels like an optional side quest, not part of their job. </p><p>At Smarty, we’ve lived this story. We’ve also learned how to fix it.

<p>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. </p><p>Like the rest of the world, Smarty employees were also impacted.

<p>Meet Dirk, Smarty's very own Swiss Army knife, with a smile. Officially, our Operations Engineer Team Lead, he's our go-to guru for IT, building management, APIs, and more. He’s also known around the office for running the <a href="/blog/inside-smarty-unique-culture#:~:text=something%20truly%20unique. -,Lunchtime%20Movie%20Script%20Reading,-Imagine%20you%27re%20in"><u>movie script reading group</u></a> (A group of Smarty workers who spend their lunch reading through well-known and classic movie scripts.

<p>Spend enough time as a software developer, and you learn about the existence and pain of technical debt. </p><p>Understanding, managing, and communicating technical debt is crucial. It allows us to build more maintainable software, improve our productivity, and even boost team morale. </p><p>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.

<p>If you’ve decided to embark on a journey of data governance, you’ll want to check out the full ebook “<a href="https://www. smarty. com/ebooks/data-governance-an-executive-survival-guide">Data Governance: An Executive’s Survival Guide</a>. ” The following is but one chapter of the guide. </p><h2>Tools available for data governance</h2><p>By outlining and implementing data quality control guidelines, data governance software helps organizations meet regulatory standards, improve security, and increase employee efficiency.

<p>At Smarty, we pride ourselves on our unique company culture, built on three core values: outwardness, wizardry, and fun. What does that mean? We're doing our best to build a company culture in a way that makes folks want to come to work. </p><h2>Smarty's mission</h2><h3>Create great products</h3><p>At Smarty, we specialize in location data intelligence, working with global address and location data in validation, autocomplete, and geocoding areas. Our services include:</p><p><a href="/products/international-address-verification">International</a> &amp; <a href="/products/us-address-verification">US Address Validation</a>: Ensuring that addresses are correctly typed and mailable prevents delayed or returned packages.

<p>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. </p><p>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.

<p>Successful data governance requires more than just rules and policies. It requires a dedicated team of professionals with clear roles and responsibilities to effectively manage and protect the data. </p><p>We recently published <strong>“Data Governance: An Executive’s Survival Guide”</strong>, an ebook that you can download right now. In it you’ll find information on data governance and other important factors in the address data game. </p><p>The following is an excerpt on the section about the different roles and responsibilities involved in data governance.

<p><strong>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. </strong></p><p>Luckily, many shipping snafus can be prevented by using address validation software. </p><p><strong>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.

<p>Typos, typoes or typo's?</p><p><strong>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. </strong></p><p>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.

<p>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. </p><p>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.

<p>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 (<a href="https://www. smarty. com/blog/how-to-clean-address-data-for-the-holiday-rush#black-friday-predictions">1</a>). </p><p>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.

<p>I was given the task of setting up a <a href="https://tinc-vpn. org/">tinc</a> 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. </p><hr><p>Installing <code>tinc</code> is straightforward enough. You can <a href="https://tinc-vpn. org/download/">download the latest release</a> and build it or install it from your favorite package manager.

<p>It's now been a few months since I decided that the kind of testing tools I wanted for Go programming hadn't yet been created (or I just hadn't found them yet. . . ). So, about 4 months ago I started work on GoConvey and a month later came the first release. </p><p>The coolest thing about GoConvey (other than the <a href="https://github. com/smartystreets/goconvey/wiki/Composition"><u>clean DSL</u></a>, comprehensive set of <a href="https://github. com/smartystreets/goconvey/wiki/Assertions"><u>built-in assertions</u></a>, and the fact that it <a href="https://github.