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THE SUPERB CONCEPT ART WORKS OF JOHN PARK

John Park is an accomplished film, game, and theme park artist.

U.S. CONSUMERS ARE FED UP WITH EXCESSIVE TEXTS AND EMAILS

40% of U.S. consumers unsubscribe from digital marketing communications at least once a week, citing excessive messages as a primary reason. Many feel overwhelmed by the volume, with 56% opting out if they receive 4+ messages from a brand in a month. This fatigue is driving a shift in how consumers interact with brands - they are becoming more protective of their data and selective about engagement.

GOOGLE MUST CRACK OPEN ANDROID FOR THIRD-PARTY STORES, RULES EPIC JUDGE

Google must open its Android platform to third-party app stores starting November 1. It will also be required to distribute these rival stores through Google Play and remove restrictions on third-party billing and app links. The decision, part of the Epic v. Google case, aims to dismantle Google's monopoly on the app marketplace and promote competition. Google plans to appeal. This ruling could reshape the Android ecosystem, encouraging more competition by 2027.

WILD'S CONTEXT-AWARE MESSAGE BAR

Wild achieved 152% growth by using a context-aware message bar that updated as users progressed through the funnel, providing clear, relevant prompts. The yellow bar's non-standard placement at the bottom of the screen ensured it stood out, with messages like “Add a case or two” guiding users smoothly. It used social proof statements such as “Most customers add 3 refills” to nudge customers toward larger purchases by normalizing higher quantities. Testing this tactic revealed how targeted, evolving messaging can influence conversions and average order value.

HOW “FREE SHIPPING & FREE RETURNS” AFFECTS CONVERSION RATES

Mentioning "Free Shipping & Free Returns" under the add to cart button tends to increase conversion rate for products with price-sensitive customers. However, this addition can have a negative effect for luxury items, as it could degrade the premium feel of the page. What works for one site or industry might not work for another, and visitors might need multiple reminders of a value prop on a website.

CRUX VIS

CrUX Vis now allows you to visualize Core Web Vitals, view trends over time, and get recommendations for improvements. Run a URL through the tool and it will give you data on the site. This is useful for benchmarking against competitor websites.

TIKTOK ROLLS OUT AUTOMATED AD TARGETING OPTIONS FOR THE HOLIDAYS

TikTok reports that brands using its new Smart+ Web Campaigns have seen a 52% improvement in return on ad spend. The Smart+ system automates ad creation, placement, and bidding, which allows marketers to input assets and goals while TikTok handles the rest.

CAN MARKETING DRIVE REVENUE GROWTH AGAIN?

Despite doubling their media spend, 20 of the top 50 advertisers saw slower revenue growth than the 2.1% GDP rate over the past 15 years. The trend highlights the need for CMOs to shift from a focus on brand awareness to strategies that directly drive revenue. CMOs can leverage Media Mix Modeling to determine the best allocation of media dollars, critically assess targeting strategies, and cut back on underperforming channels.

INSIDE HOW STRIPE CRAFTS QUALITY PRODUCTS

Stripe improved product conversion by 20% through better email aesthetics, illustrating how beauty can enhance utility and usability. Its approach to quality emphasizes the balance of utility, usability, and aesthetics to ensure products meet user expectations. Stripe uses rituals like friction logs and product previews to iterate quickly and refine offerings based on user feedback.

WHY SCIENCE NEEDS MARKETING

Scientists need marketers to communicate their findings and combat misinformation. Marketing should be integrated into scientific research from the start and research grants should include funding for communication strategies. This collaboration is critical for driving public action on urgent issues like climate change, public health, and sustainability. Without proper marketing support, scientific discoveries may fail to impact behavior on a large scale.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND FAST FOOD RESTAURANTS' SCENT MARKETING

Unlike sight or hearing, the brain processes smells almost instantaneously and creates a multi-sensory impression that lingers.

THE PINTEREST 2024 HALLOWEEN TREND REPORT

Trending searches include gothic glam, “it girl” costumes, ghost pizza, and leopard print makeup.

MARKETING I'VE BEEN OBSESSED WITH LATELY

6 brands to derive inspiration from, including Blank Street's collaboration with Melissa's Wardrobe, Rhode's launch teasers, and Wendy's Vanilla Frosty launch campaign.

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IS EXCEL IMMORTAL?

Microsoft Excel is still an essential tool today despite the rise of modern data tools and technologies. Excel's features, like its flexibility and simplicity, make it irreplaceable for many users.

THE ART OF A SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH

To achieve a successful startup launch, founders must focus on three essential pillars: narrative, timing, and distribution. A compelling narrative should clearly define the startup's identity and value proposition, while careful timing ensures alignment with market readiness and business goals. Effective distribution strategies leverage various channels and community engagement to maximize visibility and impact.

INSIDE HOW STRIPE CRAFTS QUALITY PRODUCTS

Craft involves the mastery and effort behind creating something, while quality reflects the output, focusing on utility, usability, and aesthetics. At Stripe, craft and quality are essential in delivering user-focused products that balance functionality and beauty to drive customer satisfaction and business success.

CHAT, BREATHE, AND REFLECT

In dynamic and uncertain situations, it's crucial to reduce communication layers, increase the frequency of information exchange, and be prepared to handle ambiguous data, even though this requires more effort and coordination. For leaders, trust, cognitive flexibility, and team morale are essential to make these efforts successful, while individual contributors should avoid self-blame and focus on finding areas where they can improve information flow and sense-making.

WRITING OKRS CHEATSHEET FROM MICROSOFT

To write effective OKRs, start by defining clear, qualitative objectives and measurable key results that align with your business goals while ensuring the actions required to achieve them are actionable and meaningful. Review and refine your OKRs by asking critical questions about their necessity and sufficiency, ensuring they are focused, aligned, trackable, transparent, and stretch the organization forward.

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH USER-GENERATED CONTENT

To effectively get started with user-generated content, businesses should focus on building a content marketplace by engaging existing users to create high-quality contributions while tracking key supply and demand metrics. Initially prioritizing demand through strategic distribution, such as integrating UGC into the user experience and showcasing creators, will enhance engagement and ultimately lead to sustainable growth and organic word-of-mouth.

INSIDE THE SECRET SCHOOL FOR THE WORLD'S BEST FOUNDERS

Avra is a selective program akin to a "doctoral program" for startup CEOs that helps growth-stage entrepreneurs by teaching them how to scale their businesses and build executive teams. Backed by a $350 million venture fund, Avra redefines venture capital by offering educational support first, then investing in a small selection of its graduates, focusing on post-Series A startups.

THE FED IS BRINGING THE PUNCHBOWL BACK… WHAT HAPPENS TO SAAS AND AI MULTIPLES NOW?

There is an inverse relationship between interest rates and software multiples. While recent rate cuts may boost investor sentiment for SaaS companies, fundamental weaknesses in growth and profitability metrics may temper this optimism. As interest rates decline, uncertainties about the future valuation of SaaS stocks persist, leading investors to question whether multiples will normalize to historical averages or remain at lower levels due to these fundamental challenges.

10 UNCOMMONLY USEFUL OBSERVATIONS ON PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

Achieving PMF is a gradual process driven by organic growth, user feedback, and iteration speed, with a focus on continuously refining fit as markets evolve.

STOP THINKING BIG

PMs should start by solving small, specific problems in a micro niche, like building a CRM for wedding photographers, before gradually expanding to multi-niches and adjacent markets.

Learn how Sonar helps improve AI-generated software development!

GOOD RETRY, BAD RETRY: AN INCIDENT STORY

This article explores various techniques for managing retries, including retry budgets and circuit breakers, and analyzes their effectiveness through simulations. A developer learned about the pitfalls of implementing retries in a microservice architecture. He started by adding retries to solve a transient error issue but discovered the potential for retry storms and client synchronization problems. After implementing exponential backoff and jitter, he faced a new challenge when the system experienced an hour-long outage caused by a bug in a new feature.

HOW DO HTTP SERVERS FIGURE OUT CONTENT-LENGTH?

HTTP servers determine the "Content-Length" header, which indicates the size of the response body in two ways. When the response is small enough to fit in a server buffer, the length is calculated and sent directly. For larger responses, HTTP employs "chunked transfer encoding", dividing the data into chunks with their respective lengths.

RUNNING CLANG IN THE BROWSER USING WEBASSEMBLY

Clang, a compiler front end for C/C++, can now be run directly within a web browser. This is done using the Wasmer JS SDK, which allows compiling C code to WebAssembly. This development opens up possibilities for online IDEs to adopt the SDK and enable users to compile and run C programs within their browsers.

THE FRONTEND TREADMILL

Frontend teams are wasting time and resources by constantly chasing the latest frameworks, which are usually destined to become obsolete. Instead, they should focus on mastering core web technologies and building deep expertise in their current frameworks. This approach offers greater career longevity and allows teams to hire skilled engineers who are adaptable to changing technologies.

WEB COMPONENTS ARE NOT FRAMEWORK COMPONENTS — AND THAT'S OKAY

Web Components are not meant to replace frameworks but rather to complement them. There are two ways to think about components: generalizable elements that extend HTML (where Web Components excel) and project-specific reactive templating components (where frameworks still hold an advantage). The Web Components community should focus on making them more ergonomic for authors, which would make them more viable as a compile target for frameworks.

REACT ON THE SERVER IS NOT PHP

Server-side JavaScript, specifically using React on the server, is not a return to PHP. While the concept of server-side rendering may seem similar to the old PHP approach, the underlying principles and tools have evolved drastically to offer unified stacks rather than having separate stacks for frontend and backend.

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PYTHON 3.13

Python 3.13 has been released. It includes a new interactive interpreter, experimental support for free-threaded execution, and a Just-In-Time compiler. The release also features enhanced error messages with color highlighting, improved locals() semantics, and default values for type parameters.

SQ

sq is an open-source data wrangling tool that allows users to inspect, query, join, import, and export data. It supports a wide range of data sources including common SQL databases, Excel XLSX files, CSV, TSV, JSON, JSONA, and JSONL formats. It also provides various output formats like INSERT to SQL databases, CSV, Markdown, and more.

JAZZ

Jazz is an open-source toolkit that makes building real-time, collaborative applications easier by providing a single abstraction for distributed state, replacing the need for traditional APIs, databases, and message queues. It uses CRDTs and public-key cryptography to enable real-time, cross-device synchronization with secure permissions, built-in conflict resolution, and seamless integration with various environments, including React, React Native, and NodeJS.

WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF THE USE OF "FOO" AND "BAR" IN SOURCE CODE EXAMPLES?

The terms "foo" and "bar" in code examples originated from the WWII military acronym "FUBAR" (F**ked Up Beyond All Recognition). The popularity of "foo" and "bar" in code likely stems from their association with this military jargon.

VIRTUALIZING IOS ON APPLE SILICON

A developer successfully virtualized iOS on Apple Silicon Macs through a combination of kernel patches and system modifications. The challenges encountered during the process included signature verification and binary incompatibilities between iOS and macOS. The developer used undocumented features of Apple's Virtualization framework and found hints of potential future developments like touch functionality.

OPTIMIZING POSTGRES TABLE LAYOUT FOR MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY

Postgres adds padding to data for efficient disk access through a process called “data alignment.” Misaligned columns can increase the size of tables and indexes, leading to wasted disk space and slower performance. This article provides practical examples and code snippets showing how to optimize table and index layout for better alignment.

THE NINE NODE PILLARS

The Nine Node Pillars are a set of guiding principles for building maintainable Node.js applications that includes advice like not blocking the event loop and always using Node LTS versions in production.

DOES IT SCALE (DOWN)?

Developers should prioritize scaling down their software first, starting small and only scaling up when necessary, as modern hardware makes it possible to run most applications efficiently on a single server.

6 YEARS WITH GLEAM

Gleam's type system and functional programming approach significantly increases productivity, especially in fast-growing codebases.

HOW TO FETCH DATA IN REACT

There are various methods for fetching data in React applications, including server-side fetching with React Server Components, client-side fetching with React Query, hooks, and tRPC.

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FACEBOOK LAUNCHES A GEN Z-FOCUSED REDESIGN

Meta has announced a series of changes to Facebook that will put a greater emphasis on local community information, videos, and Facebook Groups. The changes are aimed at making Facebook more approachable for those wanting to connect with their local community or be entertained. Meta also announced updates to Meta AI, Facebook Dating, and Messenger. This article goes through the long list of upcoming changes in detail.

GOOGLE'S GRIP ON SEARCH SLIPS AS TIKTOK AND AI STARTUP MOUNT CHALLENGE

TikTok has recently started allowing brands to target ads based on users' search queries and Perplexity, an AI search startup, plans to introduce ads later this month under its AI-generated answers. Google's share of the US search ad market is expected to drop below 50% next year for the first time in over a decade. Generative AI, which serves fully formed answers to user queries, is transforming search products. Companies are experimenting with ways to monetize ads with chatbots, but some analysts are uncertain whether ads in chatbots will be as valuable as traditional search because people might be less likely to click on them.

THE US HAS PASSED PEAK OBESITY, A NEW SURVEY SUGGESTS. IS IT THE OZEMPIC EFFECT?

The obesity rate in adults in the US fell by 2% between 2020 and 2023. There is no established direct link between new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and the decline in obesity, but there is a strong possibility of a link considering the medications hit the market around 2021. Approximately one in eight US adults have tried the new weight-loss drugs, with more than 15 million using a prescription. At least 25,000 people in the US are starting the drug every week.