Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

I’m a big fan of service mocking. I’ve been working in and around software for about 25 years, and one thing never changes: when you sit down to work on your code, you almost never have everything available. The database, the third-party API, the message queue, the service two teams over. Something’s missing. So you’ve got to stub it out or mock it out and keep moving.

In my younger days, eons ago in tech years, I worked on many enterprises IT projects or saw them up close. Failure rates of these projects were incredibly high. There was a mortgage system that was expected to be live in six months but ended up taking over five years and went live with a small fraction of the features originally planned. Many other projects never got out of the development phase.

dbt is the most commonly used tool by data engineers to define SQL transformations (as models), write tests, generate documentation, and deploy through CI/CD and now it’s available with Confluent Cloud too! The magic of dbt is that it brings the engineering rigor to modern data work and data engineering, regardless of the underlying compute source - Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift or Confluent. You can find out more about the launch in our Q2 Confluent Cloud Launch post and the keynote.

For teams building APIs as products, the developer portal is the front door to your business. It’s where partners discover your endpoints, where customers authenticate and start integrating, and where the quality of the experience directly shapes adoption. Now that changes.

Every Next.js application has to deal with errors, whether it's a failed API call, invalid user input, or a bug that slips into production. The App Router gives you built-in tools to handle each of these cases differently, keeping your UI intact and your users informed.

I asked Claude what the cash position would be at year-end. The answer was about 30% off. A CFO said this at a finance leaders breakfast in Prague. Almost every CFO in the room had a version of the same story. The problem is not the model. Claude is not bad at maths. The problem is what the model was reasoning over - raw financial data with no governed definitions, no intercompany rules, no agreed methodology for what 'cash position' means at that specific company.

Every FP&A team knows the feeling. The reforecast was published on Monday. By Wednesday, someone in sales has closed a deal that changes the revenue picture. By Friday, procurement has flagged a cost overrun that nobody modelled. The forecast is four days old and already partially wrong. This is not a forecasting problem. It is a data pipeline problem. Finance teams hired analysts for their analytical skills.

You closed the deal. The press release went out. Integration planning is underway. And somewhere in the finance team, a controller is opening a spreadsheet and starting to map 1,400 account codes from the acquired company's ERP into your group chart of accounts. This is the moment the chart of accounts breaks. Not dramatically. Not all at once.

At WWDC 2026, Apple shipped a long list of changes, and we covered the ones flying under the radar in our round-up of the less-reported announcements. One of them deserves a closer look on its own: the way Xcode 27 reshapes how developers manage devices and simulators. Xcode 27 ships with a new app called Device Hub, replacing Simulator.app found in older Xcodes. Device Hub is where both physical devices and simulators can be managed from now on.

SonarQube is a code quality and security platform that helps teams detect bugs, vulnerabilities, and maintainability issues early in development, using static code analysis rather than manual reviews. SonarQube fits directly into modern workflows, integrating with CI/CD pipelines and development environments to continuously verify code through quality gates, dashboards, and automated checks. And in this guide, we’ll give you.