If every day at work feels like Groundhog Day, you may be due for a change.

At a time where the tech job market seems turbulent and news of company-wide layoffs keep making headlines, simply holding down a stable gig may feel like a privilege. However, that shouldn’t stifle a desire for change, according to Alan Stein, founder and CEO of career accelerator company Kadima Careers.

Stein told IT Brew that there are several reasons why a professional may not be advancing within their company.

“It could be budget problems [and] that they’re not promoting anybody,” Stein said. “It could be that you’re frankly not that good in the eyes of the manager, and you’re not going to move up. It could be that you haven’t been there as long as some other people.”

Here’s how to combat career stagnation.—BM

Decades ago, when Mathew Thomas was a young programmer for a pager company, he learned a valuable lesson that many veteran coders have likely learned, too:

If the weekend is almost here, don’t touch anything.

“If you really want to anger the gods of software, deploy new software on a Friday afternoon,” Thomas, now SVP of engineering at KnowBe4, told us, recalling how a well-meaning colleague at the time had wanted to optimize a database by changing indexes, but did not change all of the code that uses the indexes.

Software at that pager company connected a customer relationship management (CRM) network to a network of pagers. The changes accidentally took down the CRM system, Thomas said, and there was the risk that two million customers could not manage their devices.

“It was what we call a potential extinction-level event. I mean, it was that type of bug,” he told us, remembering working the weekend to solve the problem.

Why Fridays aren’t for finding fixes.—BH

Life is full of big choices: choosing between oat and almond milk at the coffee shop, deciding if it is finally time to replace the kitchen sponge, and of course, selecting a good cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) for your business.

CNAPPs are security solutions that protect cloud applications throughout their entire life cycle. Wiz VP of Product Marketing Jiong Liu told IT Brew that the “broad acronym,” coined by Gartner, involves everything that has to do with protecting innovation occurring in the cloud.

“When we think about CNAPP, it really is those three key legs of the stool: proactive security, preventive security, and reactive security,” Liu said.

IT Brew caught up with several cloud computing experts to discuss what companies should consider when vetting out a CNAPP solution.

Not all CNAPP solutions are created equal.—BM

A purple talking gorilla once marketed as kid-friendly fun helped usher spyware into millions of homes—seriously. This wild true story unpacks the strange intersection of tech, marketing, and malware. Read now to uncover how curiosity and nostalgia masked a major privacy invasion.