Design

Here’s a valid point on the excessive prompts for everything under the sun. Cookie privacy, notifications (does anyone actually turn on notifications for a website?), newsletters, chats, UX surveys, ads, etc. etc. etc. block the user from getting to the actual content they came for. It’s a horrible experience that feels a lot like going to Walmart on a Sunday. Although there aren’t many websites that I’ve encountered that have this much going on, even two of these happening consecutively forces the user to interact and make clicks before their brain has even processed the web page – it’s a deterrent at best.
Everyone likes free things 🙂. Thanks, open-source creators.

Development

Docker is shuffling their payment plans, and it’s got quite a few people in an uproar. There’s obviously a benefit to software like this, and while I’m usually on board with open-source alternatives, there aren’t other great ‘Docker Desktop’-like applications out there.
How about the ability to do video/audio recording, converting, and streaming, directly in-browser? WIth the release of a WebASsembly / JavaScript port of FFmpeg, it’s now possible. Neat.
Github shutdown password authentication this month. We’ve long been proponents of SSH-key based authentication, but some folks might be running long-working deploy scripts using password auth. Looks like now is the time to change.
Speaking of Github, their engineering team has moved internally to utilizing Codespaces for all of their platform development. It’s an impressive move, and given some internal hardware failures of late, has some of us toying around with Codespaces to see how it could be worked into our flows.

There has long been a debate as to whether or not Google factors its analytics data into rankings. It’s becoming increasingly likely that they do not, as users can further block their tracking.
If you want to empower your customers’ habits with your brand – make sure your online store can serve up this data: Google Shopping Annotations in the Search Results.

While we have a tendency to think 2FA is a catch-all for security, this article by Todd Mitchell goes into how problematic some of the solutions can really be.
Another month, another gigantic hack exposing millions of users personal information, this time T-Mobile. Convincing people that security is worth investing in from day one is a difficult task, but maybe that pendulum will start swinging the other direction as more instances of things like this continue to occupy headspace.

Apple and Google must allow developers to use other payment systems, new Korean law declares. This has huge repercussions in the world of technology, and it will be interesting to see how other countries either follow suit or create similar laws. With Android and iOS both being the primary methods in which people interact with the world at large, the times, they are a changin’.
DuckDuckGo – An alternative search engine. This article talks about what DuckDuckGo is, how it is different from other search engines, how to use it and how they make money. An option to consider for many that are increasingly mindful of privacy online.
Divvy Homes – Younger people around the world are struggling to realize the possibility of home ownership. Divvy Homes is aiming to make home ownership more accessible and they raised $200 million in Series D funding. It will be interesting to see how this changes things moving forward and if similar startups pop up around the world to address inaccessible housing markets.