DEVPRO Journal

AI has made email security more powerful, but it hasn't changed a basic reality: attackers continually adapt their techniques to influence how messages are evaluated. One technique drawing renewed attention is text salting, which researchers have observed in campaigns designed to influence how modern detection systems assess email content. An old trick with a new target Text salting itself is not new.

AI is everywhere, and practically every news outlet discusses "agentic" capabilities. That attention is leading to increased adoption across industries. 35% of respondents in an MIT Management survey reported adopting AI agents, and another 44% plan to do so. The software industry is no exception. It often markets agentic AI as a multi-step execution tool that simplifies the development process.

If you're an ISV whose software touches a kiosk, a point-of-sale terminal, a manufacturing HMI, or any other fixed-function device, there's a deadline you need on your radar. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB both reach end of support on October 13, 2026. After that date, those devices get their final monthly security update and then they're on their own. This isn't the Windows 10 story that made headlines last year.

Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has never been higher. Neither has AI spending. Gartner predicts worldwide AI investments will rise to about $2.527 trillion in 2026 and to more than $3.336 trillion in 2027. Gartner also calls out AI software, which had a market value of $283 billion in 2025, and expects it to grow dramatically to reach $636 billion by 2027.

If you build software for a living, the funding and M&A environment around you shapes what tools you'll use, who might come knocking with an acquisition offer, and where your own investors' heads are at. Here's a look at what's happened recently across vertical SaaS, AI developer tools, and software consolidation, along with what it might mean for your business.

If your platform touches cloud infrastructure, payment processing, or AI tooling, there's a good chance something you depend on is changing in the next two months. Here's a roundup of confirmed deprecations and sunset dates coming up, organized so you can check your own dependency list against it. AWS Proton retires on October 7 AWS is ending support for Proton, its infrastructure deployment and management service, on October 7.

On August 2, 2026, the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency obligations took effect. The high-risk obligations originally scheduled for that same date did not. Under the Digital Omnibus on AI, standalone Annex III systems now have until December 2, 2027, and AI embedded in regulated products until August 2, 2028. Teams building recruitment, credit scoring, and border control tools for the EU market got roughly sixteen more months. The deadline moved. The exposure did not.

Online ordering has become a permanent part of commerce. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, ecommerce now comprises 16.9% of total retail sales, and the National Restaurant Association (NRA) reports that about 57% of restaurant customers order digitally. With more orders coming from mobile apps and ecommerce websites, businesses had to find ways to handle them quickly and accurately.

I've written about getting products to market faster. Now, let's look at making those products better. Roadmap decisions are still too often based on intuition, customer anecdotes, or the loudest customer, rather than actual customer behavior. The result? A list of problems that often includes: Feature proliferation, Waste in R&D investments, Low adoption of newly launched capabilities, and Roadmap prioritization challenges.

Somewhere in your product's security questionnaire, there is a line that says "human in the loop." Your sales team relies on it. Your customer's procurement team checks the box. Everyone in the room treats the sentence as an answer. It's not an answer. It's a description of where a person sits in your workflow, and nothing more. It says nothing about whether that person has the authority, the time, or the context to change what your product is about to do.