Architecture & MarTech Signal

Yoda Principle for better integrations

On why doing is better than trying for api and workflows design

Brand-Trained Agents Can Give Marketers A Fuller View Of Their Customers

Agentic commerce company Envive builds on-site agents for brands like footwear company Clove, painting a clearer picture of what their customers are looking for

Why A 1967 Privacy Law Is Powering A New Wave Of Ad Tech Lawsuits

If you want to see a privacy lawyer who works in ad tech roll their eyes and heave a deep sigh, then speak aloud this acronym: “CIPA.” The California Invasion o

What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect?

With everything else going on in 2026, at least we don’t have Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” to worry about. The high-profile project is over. Or is it? Not quite.

Prompt For More Ads; Who Advertises The Advertisers?

OpenAI’s push into advertising exposes a familiar economic tension. Plus: Social mixers teach people how to protect their data from Big Tech. The post Prompt Fo

SmartBear’s Swagger update targets the API drift problem AI coding tools created

Last week, SmartBear announced new capabilities for its commercial Swagger toolset designed to help organizations govern, validate, and scale APIs The post Smar

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft agree that the harness is the product. They disagree on the price.

On March 30, Sycamore announced a $65 million seed round to build what its founder calls an operating system for The post Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microso

EP211: How the JVM Works

We compile, run, and debug Java code all the time. But what exactly does the JVM do between compile and run?

Google and OpenAI are making a run at Claude’s desktop moat, and Anthropic is making it easy

I’m Matt Burns, Chief Content Officer at Insight Media Group. Each week, I round up the most important AI developments, The post Google and OpenAI are making a

How to prepare your company for the era of agentic ITops

Rules-based IT operations cost businesses hundreds of billions of dollars every year. If your company depends on human labor to The post How to prepare your com

Anthropic launches Claude Design, a Figma and Canva rival built on Claude

Anthropic Labs, the Claude-maker’s AI safety and research division, on Friday launched Claude Design, a new service in research preview The post Anthropic launc

Reaching For More Reach

With RFPs in flux, diverse-owned media companies are finding ways to use their data to improve reach. Plus: Why we’re in retail media’s “potty-training” phase.

The Pulse: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ as a weird new trend

… which will probably be the shortest-lived trend because it’s so wasteful. Also: coding AI agent subsidies could be ending, Cal.com going closed source and bla

A Guide to Relational Database Design

In this article, we cover the core concepts that inform those decisions. We’ll look at tables, keys, relationships, normalization, and joins, with each concept

The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends

Our AI tooling survey finds concerns about mounting AI costs, more engineers hitting usage limits, and AI tools having uneven effects upon different types of en

Figma Design to Code, Code to Design: Clearly Explained

This article covers how Figma’s design-to-code and code-to-design workflows actually work, starting with why the obvious approaches fail, how MCP solves them, a

Fragments: April 14

I attended the first Pragmatic Summit early this year, and while there host Gergely Orosz interviewed Kent Beck and myself on stage. The video runs for about ha

How LinkedIn Feed Uses LLMs to Serve 1.3 Billion Users

In this article, we will look at how the LinkedIn engineering team rebuilt the Feed and the challenges they faced.

Anti-patterns in event modelling - Passive-Aggressive Events

On why event-driven communication should not be only about events.

EP210: Monolithic vs Microservices vs Serverless

A monolith is usually one codebase, one database, and one deployment.

Alan Turing play in Cambridge MA

Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the Code. It’s about Alan Turing, who made a monumental contribution to both my profe

Fragments: April 9

I mostly link to written material here, but I’ve recently listened to two excellent podcasts that I can recommend. Anyone who regularly reads these fragments kn

DHH’s new way of writing code

David Heinemeier Hansson shares why he shifted to an agent-first AI workflow, and what it means for how software is built and who builds it.

Feedback Flywheel

Rahul Garg finishes his series on reducing the friction in AI-Assisted Development. He proposes a structured feedback practice that harvests learnings from AI s