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We’re pleased to share that Hanieh Madad, Senior Software Developer and Team Leader at Patient Zero, has been awarded the Women in Digital Technical Leader of the Year. This award recognises Hanieh’s dedication to her craft and her thoughtful approach to leadership within the tech industry. The judges highlighted Hanieh’s exceptional handling of a complex project, noting her skill in managing stakeholders, mentoring junior engineers, and her commitment to community contributions. In her acceptance speech, Hanieh shared, “I wouldn’t be standing here without my amazing team that I have had the privilege of working with. This award is as much theirs as it is mine.” At Patient Zero, Hanieh leads with a balance of technical expertise and thoughtful mentorship. Known for guiding complex projects to success, she consistently supports her team’s growth and development, making this recognition truly fitting. Congratulations, Hanieh, on this achievement and for the positive impact you continue to make.
Congratulations to three of our team members for being selected as finalists in the ARN Women in ICT Awards 2024. Recognised for their achievements and contributions within Patient Zero, our finalists are: Bay McGovern - Shining Star Demelza Green - Innovation Weasley Au - Graduate “This is a stunning display of emerging and established female talent in Australia,” said ARN Editor Julia Talevski. “This year’s finalists have set an extremely high bar and are a source of inspiration for women leading the way in technology — we are proud and privileged to be celebrating each and every one of them.” WIICTA 2024 will honour the channel across eight categories, spanning Innovation, Technical, Entrepreneur, Graduate, Rising Star, Shining Star, Achievement, and DE&I Individual Champion awards. In response to a wealth of standout submissions, specific categories have been divided to best acknowledge and highlight the depth of female talent in the Australian market. The winners will be announced on September 19th at the prestigious event set to take place at Doltone House in Jones Bay Wharf Sydney. For more information on the ARN Women in ICT Awards 2024, visit the official ARN announcement here .
Auto-saving is a common feature in many popular web applications like Gmail. Although it is very convenient for users it introduces certain challenges that developers and designers must address to ensure a seamless user experience. For instance, when implementing an autosave feature, it's crucial to manage user expectations by providing clear feedback about when data is being saved and ensuring that there is no data loss during the save process. When it works, it can make your application feel natural and seamless, but if auto-save breaks (especially without notifying the user) it can destroy the user’s trust in your application. Depending on the chosen technology, state management and app architecture, developers may face different issues with autosaving. But for simplicity of this discussion, let’s say we have a React app which uses react-query for state management, data fetching, caching, and background updates. We also have a number of controlled React components on a page, and every time a user interacts with this page, the same mutation request with a different payload representing the latest “state” that the user has entered or selected is made to update one database entity on the back end.
Red-team challenges have been a fun activity for PZ team members in the past, so we recently conducted a small challenge at our fortnightly brown-bag session, focusing on the burgeoning topic of prompt injection. Injection vulnerabilities all follow the same basic pattern – un-trusted input is inadvertently treated as executable code, causing the security of the system to be compromised. SQL injection (SQLi) and cross-site scripting (XSS) are probably two of the best-known variants, but other technologies are also susceptible. Does anyone remember XPath injection? As generative models get incorporated into more products, user input can be used to subvert the model. This can lead to the model revealing its system prompt or other trade secrets, reveal information about the model itself which may be commercially valuable, subvert or waste computation resources, perform unintended actions if the model is hooked up to APIs, or cause reputational damage to the company if the model can be coerced into doing amusing or inappropriate things. As an example, entrepreneur and technologist Chris Bakke was recently able to trick a Chevy dealership’s ChatGPT-powered bot into agreeing to sell him a Chevy Tahoe for $1 . Although the U.S. supreme court has yet to rule on the legal validity of a “no takesies backsies” contract (as an employee of X Chris is probably legally obligated to drive a Tesla anyway) it is not hard to imagine a future scenario with steeper financial consequences.
With the advent of ChatGPT, Bard/Gemini and Co-pilot, Generative AI, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have been thrust into the spotlight.
AI is set to disrupt all industries, especially those that are predominately based on administrative support, legal, business, and financial operations, much like insurance and financial organisations.
One of the features of life working at PZ is our brown bag lunch and learn sessions; presentations by staff on topics of interest – sometimes, but not always technical, and hopefully amusing-as-hell. Yesterday we took a break from discussing the book Accelerate and the DORA metrics to take a whirlwind tour of the current state of play running “open source” generative AI models locally. Although this talk had been ‘in the works’ for a while, one challenge was that it needed to constantly be revised as the state of AI and LLMs changed. For example, the Stable Video Diffusion examples looked kind of lame in comparison to OpenAI’s Sora videos (released less than a week ago) and Groq’s amazing 500 token-per-second hardware demo on Monday/Tuesday , and the massive context size available now in the Gemini 1.5 models (released a few hours before OpenAI announced Sora...coincidence? An effort by OpenAI to steal back the limelight! Surely NOT!). And now a day later, with the paint still drying on a highly amusing slide-deck for the talk, Google releases their “open-source" Gemma models! The day itself presented an excellent example of why having more control of your models might be a good thing. ChatGPT 4 users began reporting “crazy” and highly amusing responses to fairly normal questions . We became alerted to this when one of our own staff reported on our internal Slack about a crazy response she received to a question about the pros and cons of some API design choices. The response she got back started normally enough, but then began to seem to channel Shakespeare’s Macbeth and some other olde English phrases and finished thusly. "Choose the right charm from the box* dense or astray, it’ll call for the norm. Your batch is yours to halter or belt. When in fetch, marry the clue to the pintle, and for the after, the wood-wand’s twist'll warn it. A past to wend and a feathered rite to tend. May the gulch be bygones and the wrath eased. So set your content to the cast, with the seal, a string or trove, well-deep. A good script to set a good cast. Good health and steady wind!" The sample JSON payload was also in keeping with the rest of the answer. { "htmlContent": "
Your HTML here
", "metadata": { "modifiedBy": "witch-of-the-wood", "safety": "sanitized", "mood": "lunar" } } Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Although there were no reports of the GPT4 API being affected by this (only ChatGPT) it might have given people developing automated stock trading bots using GPT4 a reason to pause and contemplate what might have been if their stock portfolio now consisted of a massive long position on Griselda’s Cauldron Supplies. As ChatGPT would say, Good health and steady wind.
Organisations across Australia turn to Patient Zero design, build and maintain custom software applications. Our Australian based development teams are vendor & technology agnostic and ready to deliver your next project.
We have a proven track record of projects delivered in a diverse range of industries including Education, Insurance, Waste Management, Health/Medtech, Government and even EV Charging.
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We’re pleased to share that Hanieh Madad, Senior Software Developer and Team Leader at Patient Zero, has been awarded the Women in Digital Technical Leader of the Year. This award recognises Hanieh’s dedication to her craft and her thoughtful approach to leadership within the tech industry. The judges highlighted Hanieh’s exceptional handling of a complex project, noting her skill in managing stakeholders, mentoring junior engineers, and her commitment to community contributions. In her acceptance speech, Hanieh shared, “I wouldn’t be standing here without my amazing team that I have had the privilege of working with. This award is as much theirs as it is mine.” At Patient Zero, Hanieh leads with a balance of technical expertise and thoughtful mentorship. Known for guiding complex projects to success, she consistently supports her team’s growth and development, making this recognition truly fitting. Congratulations, Hanieh, on this achievement and for the positive impact you continue to make.