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MARTECH FOR DRUMMIES: WHAT MARKETERS NEED TO KNOW

INSIDE LANEIGE'S FOOD AND BEVERAGE-BASED ‘SENSORIAL MARKETING' STRATEGY

Laneige's sensorial marketing ties product launches to food and beverage collabs with local partners like Boba Guys, Dough Donuts, and Sidecar Doughnuts. It created flavor-inspired skincare experiences that engage multiple senses. Each launch included limited-edition treats, full-size product giveaways for early attendees, exclusive merch, influencer-hosted events, and community activations such as fitness classes to drive turnout and build buzz. This approach has helped Laneige stay the top-selling lip treatment brand in the US for 3 years. The brand tracks success through metrics like foot traffic, sales, video views, and especially shares and reach.

BEYONCÉ'S ‘COWBOY CARTER' TOUR ISN'T JUST A SHOW, IT'S A MARKETING MASTERPIECE

Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter tour features her haircare line Cécred as the official beauty brand and her whiskey brand SirDavis as the official spirit. The tour includes branded pop-up shops, specialty cocktails, and a robotic arm that pours her a drink on stage. The combination of entertainment and commerce positions the tour as a business blueprint that merges her personal branding with experiential marketing for her brands.

THE "10/0.7 RULE" OF AD SPEND

Spending 10% more on ads than your market share will result in you gaining 0.7% market share each year.

INDUSTRY EVENTS IN JULY 2025

6 conferences and events happening across the US in July tailored for content creators and marketers.

SEO IN THE AI ERA

A screenshot of Rand Fishkin's email explaining the rise of zero-click-everything.

Read the full guide here

AI IS KICKING OFF THE NEXT REVOLUTION OF B2B PLG

A new paradigm is emerging where non-technical users instantly build custom tools without coding, bypassing traditional software bloat and bottlenecks. This shift empowers individuals across roles to solve problems autonomously, transforming everyone into agile, product-minded creators.

THE ADS ARE COMING

AI is making voice, video, and text data newly valuable, transforming how companies collect and use personal information. As tools extract meaning from unstructured inputs, industries - from marketing to software - may be reshaped by data once considered too messy to be useful.

YOUR PRODUCT CAN'T SEE ITSELF

Treating observability as a planning input rather than a post-launch add-on transforms product development by enabling teams to learn, adapt, and iterate with clarity. By defining measurable signals early, teams reduce guesswork and build smarter, user-informed features.

PROCESS PERSON

Designing effective processes - whether formally acknowledged or not - requires empathy, flexibility, and a willingness to adapt to context and constraints. When aligned with real needs and thoughtfully iterated, these “unspoken systems” drive clarity, reduce friction, and enable teams to thrive.

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HOW TO CRAFT AN ENGAGING ELEVATOR PITCH

Communication is the most vital skill for product managers, with concise, compelling elevator pitches serving as powerful tools to spark curiosity and foster meaningful connections. By mastering clear messaging tailored to each audience, professionals can build trust, open doors, and accelerate their impact.

HOW TO NEGOTIATE LIKE AN EXPERT: 7 SECRETS FROM RESEARCH

Negotiation often feels frustrating because of predictable mental traps like overcommitment, anchoring, and overconfidence. The key to negotiating well is recognizing these biases, understanding both your and the other party's alternatives, and staying flexible enough to reach an outcome that works for both sides.

NETWORKING, REFRAMED

Shifting from transactional networking to genuine connection reframes relationship-building as meaningful and reciprocal, not performative. Prioritizing service, trust, and presence creates lasting opportunities and a powerful professional reputation.

HOW TO ADVANCE YOUR CAREER WITHOUT MANAGING PEOPLE (49 MINUTE PODCAST)

Shopify replaced the traditional corporate ladder with a mastery system that rewards skill and impact instead of management. By focusing on mission alignment, built-in AI tools, and reducing distractions, it empowers high-agency employees to do their best work.

ANATOMY OF A CUSTOMER-FACING ROADMAP DECK

Customer-facing roadmaps build trust, spark feedback, and aid renewals by aligning with client needs without promising delivery.

GOOD STRUGGLE VS BAD STRUGGLE

Not all struggle leads to growth - some challenges build resilience, while others drain without reward.

6 WAYS SLACK, NOTION, AND VSCODE IMPROVED ELECTRON APP PERFORMANCE

Electron apps often face performance challenges like slow startup times and poor interaction, but these can be improved with strategic optimizations. The most impactful strategies include using a bundler to avoid synchronous `require()` calls, deferring non-critical imports with code splitting, and migrating computationally expensive tasks to WebAssembly or native modules. More improvements come from using V8 snapshots for faster initialization and by actively monitoring end-user performance with tools.

PARTICLE LIFE SIMULATION IN BROWSER USING WEBGPU

WHICH GO ROUTER SHOULD I USE?

This article evaluates 30 third-party routers and recommends five: http.ServeMux, httprouter, chi, flow, and gorilla/mux. http.ServeMux is good due to its standard library status, while alternatives like gorilla/mux or chi are better for complex matching requirement. httprouter and flow are good for custom 404/405 responses.

YOU PROBABLY DON'T NEED A DI FRAMEWORK

Manual dependency wiring is better than using Dependency Injection (DI) frameworks in Go. DI, at its core, is simply passing dependencies into constructors rather than creating them internally. As a result, DI frameworks can introduce complexity by relying on reflection or code generation, leading to runtime errors or difficult debugging.

THE COPILOT DELUSION

AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot promote an illusion of progress and degrade programming skills. While they are occasionally helpful for syntax and brainstorming, they lead to lazy coding, technical debt, and a disconnection from the underlying hardware.

ASK HN: ANYONE STRUGGLING TO GET VALUE OUT OF CODING LLMS? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

LLMs aren't always great for core coding tasks, as the generated code often requires excessive micromanagement and isn't maintainable. Some find LLMs highly productive for greenfield projects, but less helpful for maintaining existing systems or handling complex features. Others find that LLMs raise the floor of software dev skills.

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PGDOG

PgDog is a Rust-based transaction pooler and logical replication manager designed to shard PostgreSQL databases. It acts as a load balancer, supporting healthchecks, failover, and various connection routing strategies, including directing SELECT queries to replicas.

ANTHROPIC RUBY SDK

The Anthropic Ruby SDK provides easy access to the Anthropic REST API from Ruby apps, with features like streaming responses, pagination, file uploads, error handling, retries, timeouts, AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex integration, and Sorbet typing.

GOOGLE IS BURYING THE WEB ALIVE

Google's new AI Overviews and AI Mode are changing how users interact with search results. Instead of directing users to external websites, these features summarize information directly within Google's interface, effectively demoting and burying the original sources. This shift risks undermining the websites that supply Google with data, starving them of traffic and revenue.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF WEBHOOK SECURITY AND API SECURITY

There's a common practice of signing webhook requests with HMAC-SHA256 while API requests often rely on just API keys. Request signing has benefits like reduced secret leakage, replay protection, and integrity verification, but it also introduces complexity and performance overhead. Herd mentality and historical precedent contribute to this double standard, but in today's world, it's fine for webhooks to also just use shared secrets like API requests.

HOW TO RUN LLMS ON-DEVICE IN REACT NATIVE WITH VERCEL AI SDK

`react-native-ai` is a React Native library powered by the MLC LLM Engine and compatible with Vercel AI SDK, letting devs run LLMs on-device within React Native apps.

MAKING NEXT.JS NAVIGATION FAST AF

Faster Next.js page navigation is possible by using React Router and a static app shell for client-side routing instead of Next.js's default navigation.

I THINK IT'S TIME TO GIVE NIX A CHANCE

Despite its steep learning curve, Nix, a functional package manager, is worth considering because it solves the growing problem of irreproducible software development environments through its approach of isolated, cryptographically-assured package management, and reproducible environments with flakes.

AI MAKES BAD MANAGERS

Relying on AI to perform core management tasks, like performance reviews, prevents managers from developing the core skills needed to become good managers, such as the difficult decision-making required for effective leadership.

WorkSO Radar.

THE MAN WHO ‘A.G.I.-PILLED' GOOGLE

Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, has been dreaming of artificial general intelligence (AGI) for years. He was already taking the possibility of AGI seriously when Google acquired DeepMind in 2014. Today, he is among a growing number of tech leaders racing to build AGI. Hassabis and a colleague received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their work on AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins. This article contains a transcript of an interview with Hassabis about his views on AGI and the future that follows its arrival.

NVIDIA PUSHES FURTHER INTO CLOUD WITH GPU MARKETPLACE

Nvidia's DGX Cloud Lepton is a new service designed to link artificial intelligence developers with Nvidia's network of cloud providers, including CoreWeave, Lambda, and Crusoe. It provides access to Nvidia's graphics processing units, making those chips more widely accessible to all developers. The platform will have a marketplace of GPU cloud vendors that developers can pick from to train and use their AI models. Developers can choose which cloud provider to work with and even work with multiple cloud providers.

ROBOTS ARE STARTING TO MAKE DECISIONS IN THE OPERATING ROOM

Autonomous robots aren't being used to operate on people yet, but the technology is almost capable of such a feat and more autonomy is on the way. The technology could help hospitals meet the high demand for safety and consistency during surgeries, manage routine tasks, and prevent mistakes. Future robots will use AI to autonomously manage movements and decision-making during surgical tasks, reducing the need for constant human input. With the number of surgeons around the world declining while the number of people who need surgery continues to increase, the need for the technology is clear.

VALVE CEO GABE NEWELL'S NEURALINK COMPETITOR IS EXPECTING ITS FIRST BRAIN CHIP THIS YEAR

Starfish Neuroscience, a brain-computer interface startup incorporated by Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell, plans to produce its very first brain chip later this year. The company is currently seeking collaborators to open up avenues for the technology. Starfish's goal is to create a smaller and less invasive implant than the competition that can enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions. Details from the chip's current spec sheet are available in the article. The article also links to a video of a talk from Valve that explains how the technology could enhance gaming.

STUFF I LEARNED AT CARTA

Will Larson worked at Carta as its CTO for the past two years. This post contains the most important lessons Larson learned in his time at the company, covering topics such as engineering strategy, large language model adoption, multi-dimensional tradeoffs, creating software quality, and more.

OPENAI: SCALING POSTGRESQL TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Bohan Zhang, a member of OpenAI's Infrastructure team, recently shared the company's best practices with PostgreSQL at the PGConf.dev 2025 Global Developer Conference. The talk offers a glimpse into the database usage of one of the most prominent unicorn companies and demonstrates how PostgreSQL can scale gracefully under massive read loads. OpenAI utilizes managed databases on Azure, employing a classic PostgreSQL primary-replication architecture without sharding. This article covers the content of Zhang's talk along with comments and includes some more details about OpenAI's infrastructure.

AT AMAZON, SOME CODERS SAY THEIR JOBS HAVE BEGUN TO RESEMBLE WAREHOUSE WORK

As AI spreads through the labor force, many white-collar workers say their work is becoming more routine, less thoughtful, and much faster-paced. Companies seem to be persuaded that AI can increase productivity. Teams are getting smaller, but they're being expected to output the same amount of work by using AI. Managers say that AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work, but for inexperienced workers, the change resembles the shift from artisanal work to factory work in the 19th and 20th centuries.

ASK HN: GO DEEP INTO AI/LLMS OR JUST USE THEM AS TOOLS? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Large language models are becoming commodities. Many people use them, but few people are developing them from scratch. Developing large language models involves a lot of hardcore computer science and math - people can use them without having to know any of the internals. While it might be helpful to understand some of the internals and math, it's probably best to stick to learning how to get good at using these models and integrating what they do into agentic systems.

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ROOT FOR YOUR FRIENDS

Rooting for your friends is the best way to improve your career, happiness, and the people you care about.

F2

F2 is a cross-platform command-line tool for batch renaming files and directories quickly and safely.