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Defining our industry's methodologies, standards, and culture have long been a part of Happy Cog's values.

We started Cognition as a product to offer advice, create a dialogue, and serve our industry and clients to help them with their goals and aspirations.

Learn more about Happy Cog at happycog.com.

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    Take Your Child to (Remote) Work Day 2024

    Headshot of Matt Weinberg

    4/25/24

    by Matt Weinberg

    In honor of this year's Take Your Child to Work Day, Happy Coggers again asked their kids: “What do I do at work?” Here’s what they answered:

  2. 2024 cognition refreshing an internal tool

    Refreshing an Internal Tool

    Headshot of Ben Carr

    3/14/24

    by Ben Carr

    At Happy Cog, we work on a sprint-based cadence. Designers and developers are allocated to open projects for a specific number of hours in each sprint, and we try to keep our team members planned up to 6 months into the future. Priorities, allocations, and assignments always change during that timeframe, but having a baseline plan in place helps us forecast hiring needs and prepare early for larger engagements.

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    Google Analytics 4: Waiting Is No Longer an Option

    Headshot of Lee Goldberg

    3/18/22

    by Lee Goldberg

    Let’s face it: change is always hard. It typically requires time, resources, and effort. It will also generally include a learning curve, as well as paying off technical debt – particularly when it comes to web technologies and software. In the web analytics space, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) represents a major change to the class-leading tool that so many of us are familiar with.

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    #BreakTheBias

    Headshot of Amelia Pardieu

    3/8/22

    by Amelia Pardieu

    International Women's Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. This year’s theme of #BreakTheBias highlights the need to support achievements that empower and enable the wide spectrum of women that make up this world.

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    Tips for Working from Home

    Headshot of Alex Kendrick

    2/10/22

    by Alex Kendrick

    In 2021, we went from a company with two offices where many of our people worked daily, to a fully remote company. While some of us have years of experience working from home, many others were new to it.

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    Our Recommendations from the React Native Plugin Ecosystem

    Headshot of Rob Sanchez

    12/13/21

    by Rob Sanchez

    We have tried many platforms to develop mobile apps in the past, but lately we’ve settled on React Native as our platform of choice. It allows us to build native cross-platform (iOS and Android) mobile applications—all from one codebase. And, because it’s just React under-the-hood, anyone on our staff can contribute without having specialized mobile app expertise. This allows us to quickly build an app prototype and rapidly iterate to complete a production-worthy application, in a fraction of the time it would take to build separate applications for each mobile platform.

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    Accessibility is Everyone’s Job

    Headshot of Dana Pavlichko

    11/30/21

    by Dana Pavlichko

    It’s been 18 years since Happy Cog founder and web standards advocate Jeffrey Zeldman originally published Designing With Web Standards. The web itself may seem in many places unrecognizable now compared to what it was. We’ve added new devices, seen frameworks fall in and out of fashion, matured whole disciplines, seen the real and lasting global impacts of the digital and connected world – for better or for worse. Life without all these things seems nearly unimaginable at this point.

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    Using Headless Craft CMS to Send Mobile Push Notifications

    Headshot of Eli Van Zoeren

    11/17/21

    by Eli Van Zoeren

    Happy Cog recently launched a new website for Optimize, an online community that teaches members how to improve their lives, drawing wisdom from a variety of teachers and sources. The foundation of the project is a headless Craft back-end that powers a Nuxt-based website and both Android and iOS mobile apps, all via a custom-built API layer. One of the requirements for the mobile apps was the ability to send push notifications for Optimize’s “Daily Wisdom” posts, which we accomplished using a custom Craft module.

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    That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles

    Headshot of Lauren Harris

    10/29/21

    by Lauren Harris

    In case you haven’t heard, Google Chrome is pulling the plug on third-party cookies in mid-2023. It’s the end of digital advertising as we know it, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, companies that learn to master first-party data and embrace privacy as part of their strategy will thrive in this new landscape.

  10. The Changing Nature of SEO

    The Changing Nature of SEO

    Headshot of Dre Ryan

    10/19/21

    by Dre Ryan

    Google changes its search algorithm 500 to 600 times each year. SEO is constantly evolving, and that’s clear, but what’s most important about the ever-changing nature of SEO is how we, as marketers, adapt to these changes to drive results for our clients. To adjust to search in 2021, you don’t need to memorize every algorithm update; you just need to understand a few core things. Remember: SEO is complex, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.