#22 Story Points

Welcome back to Story Points, where our tech news are fresher than your unboxing experience with a brand-new gadget. Let's unwrap this week's stories!

News sprint

1. A US judge ruled that Google has established an illegal monopoly on search through multi-billion dollar deals. #Search
2. Speaking of antitrust investigations, the UK is officially launching a formal probe into Amazon's recent $4 billion investment in Anthropic AI. They have until October 4th to decide whether to move the investigation further. #M&A
3. CrowdStrike's president personally accepted a “Most Epic Fail” award at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas. #CrowdStrike
4. New CSS framework just dropped: Orbit leverages CSS trigonometric functions (cos and sin) to create simple or complex radial designs and UIs. #CSS
5. Dang! This person wrote a Rust program to create 175 pixel-style fonts almost instantly. Here's the full run-down of the process. #Rust
6. Google DeepMind has trained a robot to become a solid amateur-level table tennis player. #Robotics
7. TikTok is coming for messaging apps –?group chats are now available in the app, enabling conversations with up to 32 users. #SocialMedia

Retrospective

Comment from LLI’s team about CrowdStrike's newest award:

Much has already been said about CrowdStrike's recent failure that stopped the corporate world for a few days. While it's surely not the type of mistake one can easily forgive and forget – as attested by the barrage of lawsuits coming from the affected companies and their customers –, we have to tip our hats to Michael Sentonas, the company's president, humbling recognition of this costly and embarrassing mistake.

While accepting the award, Sentonas said it was “super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong, which we did in this case” and highlighted that the trophy will be placed where everybody in the company can see it.

Corporate leaders often shy away from owning their mistakes. Often, their responses become a worse PR nightmare than the mistake itself. While it should be the norm and not the exception, it's refreshing to see such a display of responsibility and grace rather than a bland statement full of lawyer-approved corporate-speak.

Accepting the award won't redeem the company of its sins – the courts will decide on its punishment – but it does, ironically, help their image. We can only hope it will also serve as a constant reminder to improve their internal processes as well.

The Backlog

The cost of poor-quality software is estimated to be trillions of dollars per year. How much does Software Quality (and lack thereof) really cost?

Find the answer in our article.