API-database coupling vs. traditional multi-layered architectures: what’s the difference and why does it matter? The main difference between direct API-database coupling and multi-layered architectures is that the former allows the API to interact directly with the database, minimizing latency and complexity, while the latter uses multiple layers to separate concerns.

I have been having quite a bit of fun in this blog series exploring the “sliding doors” (or divergent paths) that organizations can take with their AI and data initiatives. The right door can lead to great value, as I covered in my previous posts on ESG reporting, data products, and responsible AI.

For enterprises, commercial use of AI is still in its early stages, and it’s a case of risk and reward, weighing up both and investigating the best way forward. Of course, there’s much to gain from the use of AI. Already, companies are providing better customer service, parsing complex information through natural language inputs, and generally making workflows faster.

We did a sort of time travel on 20th April at QonfX. If you are not one of the 3000+ people who registered for this event, it is a unique software testing conference that keeps its focus on the Future of Testing. This year was the second edition of QonfX and received even more love than the last time. Feedback like the above filled our social feeds during and post QonfX. We cannot keep a count of the number of times attendees used the words ‘eye-opening’ for the talks given by the speakers.

Background jobs are essential to many Ruby on Rails apps. Since the introduction of ActiveJob, Rails developers have been able to manage their background jobs as natively as they do their database records. Still, ActiveJob requires you to select (and support) a backend adapter that will implement ActiveJob's backend. Many use Redis, a memory cache, to queue and process background jobs. Redis comes with incredible speed but is yet another dependency to maintain.

You can use the new comprehensive search bar in Kong Konnect to quickly retrieve the information you need across Konnect entities so you can focus on taking action. Operating through a platform search API, the new search bar’s query syntax offers advanced and precise search capabilities and is designed to cater to a wide range of search requirements, enabling you to find the information you need across different areas of the product with ease and speed.

In Swift, an enum (short for enumeration) is a powerful feature that allows us to define a data type with a fixed set of related values so we can work with those values in a type-safe way within our code. In this article we’ll be taking a closer look at Swift enums and their applications in Swift, as well as providing some real-world examples of how we could deploy them in our builds.