Name: Happy Cog
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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.

5 Things I’ve Learned About Tech Leadership

11/25/19

by Jeremy Gimbel

Tech leadership is a mystery to many. As one racks up years of experience as a developer, there’s often an assumption that one must eventually move into tech leadership to continue to grow. And while this may be true, given the structure and hierarchy of the company you work for, the jump from individual contributor to tech leader isn’t always smooth. The two roles have some crossover in skills, but each also requires its own unique set of skills to get the job done as well.
4 Ways to Make Your Holiday Strategy Even Merrier This Year

11/7/19

by Lee Goldberg

If you’re an online retailer, Q4 ‘tis the season to be jolly. You’ve likely already started to prepare your strategy for making the holiday shopping season as successful as possible, which is great. Based on our experience working with a variety of online retailers over the years, we’re highlighting some best practices and effective optimization tips to make this year be the best one yet.
A Day in the Life of a Project Manager

10/1/19

by Saima Khan

Happy Cog’s Project Management Team is a well-oiled machine built upon a solid foundation. But with an ever-expanding clientele, growing cross-departmental teams, and external competition always chasing us, we needed to elevate the team that is the heart of the agency to the next level. Starting in Summer 2018, we developed a series of initiatives designed to help strengthen that foundation. We started with the basics – adding structure and levels to the team. We began to define our methodology as Hybrid – think of that as a mixture of waterfall and agile! We tried and tested our tools and found what works for us. We totally re-hauled the project life cycle by introducing phases, which in turn has made the management of our Greenfield and Retainer projects consistent and manageable. Something we are really proud of is our team camaraderie. Through weekly 1:1s, weekly department meetings, and those ever-popular monthly nights out, we are stronger and better than ever!
Enter the Matrix

9/20/19

by Andrew Kaslick

A few years ago, a fellow developer (Santiago Sosa) and I were brainstorming ways to foster our company culture when we came up with the idea to bring our developers together more often for informal discovery sessions. In the company’s early days, we were a fairly small and close-knit development team that usually had a decent idea of what everyone else was working on and what technologies everyone was using. However, as the team began to quickly grow, we realized that developers were working on a wide variety of projects and were bringing with them a diverse set of skills and knowledge that many other developers were unfamiliar with. Often, developers weren’t aware of all the exciting projects that others were involved with. We felt it would be an incredibly valuable opportunity for the team to share what they were working on with each other on a regular basis.
Design Experimentation: Exploring the Evolution of Ideation

8/13/19

by Kate Lechleiter

When I started design school, I was surprised to hear my professors say things like “there is no right answer” or “keep exploring, you’re not there yet.” Coming from the world of high school calculus and definitive, objective answers, it all felt a little too open-ended for me. However, I quickly learned that with this iterative way of thinking and experimenting, there weren’t any wrong answers either. As designers, we need to be willing to share a spectrum of ideas, including ones we might be unsure about, in order to receive the most helpful feedback, collaborate with our teammates, and ultimately produce the best designs.
Humans vs Machines: When to Automate Your Paid Media Campaigns

7/2/19

by Lee Goldberg

Claude Shannon, the late American Mathematician, largely known as the ‘father of information theory,’ once remarked that he can “visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans.” Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are no longer mere buzzwords. They’ve evolved to be an integral part of society, powering everything from self-driving cars to Amazon’s Alexa. Within the MarTech space, it’s now hard to find a software package or technology that doesn’t tout its use of machine learning. Indeed, machine learning and AI have been incredibly powerful in the paid media space, automating tasks that practitioners could do, but would rather not. This is especially true for tasks that take a disproportionate amount of time relative to the benefit earned.
Crafting for the Author Experience

7/1/19

by Kyle Cotter

I am currently the Author Experience Lead at Happy Cog and I’ve been making websites for the past 12 years, starting in middle school. I’ve been involved with the ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS communities for the bulk of that time.

At Happy Cog, we pride ourselves on the level of attention and detail we put into planning our CMS projects, which extends deeply into thinking about the Author Experience – an area that is typically neglected.
Art + Science: Creating a Comprehensive SEO Strategy That Complements a Beautiful Design

6/19/19

by Lee Goldberg

Let’s face it – SEO and UX design don’t have the greatest history together. In the early, nascent days of the web, designers used to joke that if you talked to an SEO professional, they’d advise that your website should include nothing more than a white background with black text, lots of hyperlinks, and repetitive, monotonous copy, all in the name of “keyword density.” Indeed, in the early days of search (going back to the era of Yahoo!, Excite, Hotbot, and Dogpile – before Google was even a public company), simplicity was key — and search engines could do little beyond scanning text on a page.
Is This Thing STILL On?

5/28/19

by Stuart Henry

Cognition launched on October 7th, 2010 with this very interesting inaugural post by Happy Cog Founder Jeffrey Zeldman. It began as a “design blog”, then evolved over many years serving a loyal community seeking interesting content relevant to the ever-growing digital space. We’ve heard testimonials from many past and present Happy Cog team members, as well as external parties, about the contribution Cognition served them as they grew their own abilities and careers.
Fighting Stage Fright

2/2/17

by Tom McQuaid

In my younger days I performed quite a bit. I liked rehearsing and being on stage. I was a student teacher for an acting class. I somehow became the host of my high school talent show (footage of that has been burned). Yet despite having zero qualms about putting myself out there once my lines had been memorized, I was completely and utterly terrified of auditions. To this day, I have recurring nightmares about auditioning for a play and bombing so miserably that I feel embarrassed for hours after waking up.

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