Technology

Tip: AI doesn’t eliminate the need to know how things work. It increases the value of knowing why they work. I ran into a problem this week with an email that was sent with a bad link. To fix it I needed to create a redirect, but not a simple redirect. This particular link relied…

I’m a big advocate of “good enough” for many things, but there are times when “good enough” is a bad bargain, and technology is a prime example. Q: How is your IT department like the D.C. Metro? A: Both of them have huge incentives to put off essential upgrades and improvements until you have a…

A cookie is a small text file that a website can write to your computer. It typically includes a unique ID for each visitor. Remember that there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between a “visitor” and a person. The “visitor” is an internet browser, like Chrome or Safari. There’s often a human behind that browser, but…

Summary: It’s impossible to avoid duplicative functionality in your tech stack. Here are 12 things to consider when deciding where you want that functionality to reside. One of the challenges of building a tech stack is that there are always overlaps in functionality. For example, your customer data platform and your email service provider might…

Summary: How does the Pareto principle, which posits that 20% of causes generate 80% of effects, fit with your tech stack? Can you do 20 percent of the effort and get 80 percent of the benefits? I’ve mentioned the Pareto principle before. It’s one of those odd quirks about life that sticks with you. It…

Summary: 3rd party cookies are going away. They’re used for tracking behavior across multiple websites. 1st party cookies will remain. This article explains the difference between them. We keep hearing that cookies are going away, but that’s not quite true. Third party cookies are supposedly on their way out, although the process has taken longer…