Scott and Wes break down the biggest web platform features that reached Baseline in 2025, separating the genuinely useful APIs from the niche and forgettable ones. From same-document view transitions and the Popover API to Promise.try, content-visibility, and modern CSS goodies, they share what’s actually ready to use today.

Show Notes

• 00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
• 01:37 24 new web APIs that reached baseline in 2025.
• 01:49 Same-document view transitions for single-page applications.
• 05:28 abs()
• 08:22 Brought to you by Sentry.io.
• 09:20 JSON Module Scripts.
• 10:10 Popover API.
• 13:07 Base64 to UInt8Array.
  • Better Binary Batter Mixing
• 16:11 @starting-style
  • Scott’s A CSS Only Accordion with <details>
  • Scott’s Mobile Nav
• 17:39 allow-discrete
• 21:31 Promise.try
• 22:51 content-visibility

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Xmas Special: Software Industry Transformation - Why Software Development Must Mature

Welcome to the 2025 Xmas special - a five-episode deep dive into how software as an industry needs to transform. In this opening episode, we explore the fundamental disconnect between how we manage software and what software actually is. From small businesses to global infrastructure, software has become the backbone of modern society, yet we continue to manage it with tools designed for building ships in the 1800s. This episode sets the stage for understanding why software development must evolve into a mature discipline.

Software Runs Everything Now

"Without any single piece, I couldn't operate - and I'm tiny. Scale this reality up: software isn't just in tech companies anymore."

Even the smallest businesses today run entirely on software infrastructure. A small consulting and media business depends on WordPress for websites, Kajabi for courses, Stripe for payments, Quaderno for accounting, plus email, calendar, CRM systems, and AI assistants for content creation. The challenge? We're managing this critical infrastructure with tools designed for building physical structures with fixed requirements - an approach that fundamentally misunderstands what software is and how it evolves. This disconnect has to change.

The Oscillation Between Technology and Process

"AI amplifies our ability to create software, but doesn't solve the fundamental process problems of maintaining, evolving, and enhancing that software over its lifetime."

Software improvement follows a predictable pattern: technology leaps forward, then processes must adapt to manage the new complexity. In the 1960s-70s, we moved from machine code to COBOL and Fortran, which was revolutionary but led to the "software crisis" when we couldn't manage the resulting complexity. This eventually drove us toward structured programming and object-oriented programming as process responses, which, in turn, resulted in technology changes!

Today, AI tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude make writing code absurdly easy - but writing code was never the hard part. Robert Glass documents in "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" that maintenance typically consumes between 40 and 80 percent of software costs, making "maintenance" probably the most important life cycle phase. We're overdue for a process evolution that addresses the real challenge: maintaining, evolving, and enhancing software over its lifetime.

Software Creates An Expanding Possibility Space

"If they'd treated it like a construction project ('ship v1.0 and we're done'), it would never have reached that value."

Traditional project management assumes fixed scope, known solutions, and a definable "done" state. The Sydney Opera House exemplifies this: designed in 1957, completed in 1973, ten times over budget, with the architect resigning - but once built, it stands with "minimal" (compared to initial cost) maintenance. Software operates fundamentally differently. Slack started as an internal tool for a failed gaming company called Glitch in 2013. When the game failed, they noticed their communication tool was special and pivoted entirely. After launching in 2014, Slack continuously evolved based on user feedback: adding threads in 2017, calls in 2016, workflow builder in 2019, and Canvas in 2023. Each addition changed what was possible in organizational communication. In 2021, Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion precisely because it kept evolving with user needs. The key difference is that software creates possibility space that didn't exist before, and that space keeps expanding through continuous evolution.

Software Is Societal Infrastructure

"This wasn't a cyber attack - it was a software update gone wrong."

Software has become essential societal infrastructure, not optional and not just for tech companies. In July 2024, a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed 8.5 million Windows computers globally. Airlines grounded flights, hospitals canceled surgeries, banks couldn't process transactions, and 911 services went down. The global cost exceeded $10 billion. This wasn't an attack - it was a routine update that failed catastrophically. AWS outages in 2021 and 2023 took down major portions of the internet, stopping Netflix, Disney+, Robinhood, and Ring doorbells from working. CloudFlare outages similarly cascaded across daily-use services. When software fails, society fails. We cannot keep managing something this critical with tools designed for building physical things with fixed requirements. Project management was brilliant for its era, but that era isn't this one.

The Path Ahead: Four Critical Challenges

"The software industry doesn't just need better tools - it needs to become a mature discipline."

This five-episode series will address how we mature as an industry by facing four critical challenges:

• Episode 2: The Project Management Trap - Why we think in terms of projects, dates, scope, and "done" when software is never done, and how this mindset prevents us from treating software as a living capability

• Episode 3: What's Already Working - The better approaches we've already discovered, including iterative delivery, feedback loops, and continuous improvement, with real examples of companies doing this well

• Episode 4: The Organizational Immune System - Why better approaches aren't universal, how organizations unconsciously resist what would help them, and the hidden forces preventing adoption

• Episode 5: Software-Native Organizations - What it means to truly be a software-native organization, transforming how the business thinks, not just using agile on teams

Software is too important to our society to keep getting it wrong. We have much of the knowledge we need - the challenge is adoption and evolution. Over the next four episodes, we'll build this case together, starting with understanding why we keep falling into the same trap.

References For Further Reading

• Glass, Robert L. "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" - Fact 41, page 115 

• CrowdStrike incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident 

• AWS outages: 2021 (Dec 7), 2023 (June 13),  and November 2025 incidents 

• CloudFlare outages: 2022 (June 21), and November 2025 major incident 

• Slack history and Salesforce acquisition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software) 

• Sydney Opera House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House

About Vasco Duarte

Vasco Duarte is a thought leader in the Agile space, co-founder of Agile Finland, and host of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, which has over 10 million downloads. Author of NoEstimates: How To Measure Project Progress Without Estimating, Vasco is a sought-after speaker and consultant helping organizations embrace Agile practices to achieve business success.

You can link with Vasco Duarte on LinkedIn.

As leaders gain responsibility, honest feedback disappears. Bob and Josh explore why power dynamics silence your team, how to find truth tellers who will call you out, and why no criticism isn't good news—it's a warning sign. Learn to mine for feedback and fix your leadership blind spots.

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In this Christmas Special 2025 episode of Betatalks, Rick and Oscar reflect on how AI has moved this year from hype to practical use. They discuss real-world examples, the maturing AI ecosystem, and the challenge of adopting AI at the right time. 

We want to thank all our guests and listeners for an amazing year, and we hope to see you in 2026.
 
 We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year!

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Exploring the intersection of AI and code this week, I stumbled on a treasure trove of practical insights, from building AI agents in n8n to Meta’s groundbreaking SAM Audio model. The blend of low-code tools, IDE integrations, and deep dives into .NET profiling shows how innovation is bridging creativity and technical rigor. Whether you’re automating workflows or decoding audio separation, there’s something here to spark curiosity and curiosity-driven coding.

AI

• 15 Practical AI Agent Examples to Scale Your Business in 2025 - This post contains many very good ideas of low-code agents that can really help you go through many different types of data

• Introducing SAM Audio: The First Unified Multimodal Model for Audio Separation - An insightful post about how AI could be used in audio

• How to Build an AI Agent in n8n for Beginners: Complete 2025 Guide (Snaplama) - I'm a fan of integration tools, and n8n is obviously part of those great tools. That AI node is very useful, and there are numerous ideas and applications you can explore with it. This post shares how you can do it as an agent, and I think a lot of people should try it

• When AI Amplifies Your Bad (and Good) Habits | The JetBrains AI Blog (Kris Kang) - Another post that helps us picture AI, giving us references to better understand how to use it to achieve the desired result.

• Bring your own AI agent to JetBrains IDEs (Sergey Ignatov) - This post shares many news, yes, you can bring your agent into writer, but also a collaboration with Zed and many new features related to those agents, looking forward to dig into those novelties

Programming

• Aspire 13.1 - Our holiday gift to you (David Fowler) - Nice update for Aspire!

• Creating a .NET CLR profiler using C# and NativeAOT with Silhouette (Andrew Lock) - A deep and very interesting post that plays with the unmanaged function.

• Aspire—Your Stack, Streamlined - Great release. There are breaking changes with Redis, so totally worth the 2 minutes of reading.