When discussing modern API security, developers frequently conflate terms like bearer token and JSON Web Token (JWT). This semantic confusion around access tokens often masks a critical architectural distinction. A bearer token specifies the transmission mechanism, while a JWT defines a specific, structured data format. But due to the extensive adoption of JWTs, there is ...
#api architecture
26 posts
21 May
7 May
Thanks to pioneers like Twilio and Stripe, API products have redefined what a great developer experience (DX) looks like. These companies have demonstrated how targeted API products, along with exceptional documentation and onboarding, can make developers enthusiastic advocates for their brands. However, the API product market is shifting — the rise of AI agents means ...
22 Apr
At some point or another, most software developers find themselves at a career crossroads. In one direction is comfort, ease, and predictability. In the other? Challenge, intention, and responsibility. (And, yes, higher salaries to go along with them.) That second route is what happens when developers start to think more deeply about the systems behind ...
15 Apr
While some commentators in tech say that microservices architecture has seen its heyday, in reality, it’s still foundational to some massive distributed digital systems, from Netflix, to Amazon, SoundCloud, and beyond. But how exactly do you operationalize thousands of distributed microservices living in various environments? Successful microservices adoption tales often revolve around using service mesh, ...
8 Apr
It’s 2026, and if you follow the tech industry, you are likely already familiar with terms like MCP servers and clients, LLMs, AI agents, and RAG applications. These components represent the visible surface when it comes to the AI conversation. But have you ever stopped to consider the underlying infrastructure that actually makes these technologies ...
7 Apr
In 2020, software engineer Ivan Velichko published an article titled “API Developers Never REST,” detailing the rise of alternate design strategies that have emerged since Roy Fielding published his dissertation in 2000. Yes, the title is a jokey hook designed to snag eyeballs and attention, but like all good humor, there’s a kernel of truth ...
1 Apr
In October 2025, Anthropic released Agent Skills as a feature for Claude. Within two months, early Agentic Skills had been built by partners like Atlassian, Figma, Canva, Stripe, Notion, and Zapier. How did a brand-new feature evolve into a pattern adopted so quickly across the enterprise? The rapid ascent of agent skills speaks to their ...
26 Mar
The autonomous future is nearly upon us. Every day seems to bring a fresh wave of headlines involving autonomous cars or self-driving trucks. Users are taking more than 700,000 autonomous taxi rides each week, according to McKinsey, while the first autonomous truck pilots are starting to hit the pavement. European countries have already hosted 35 ...
24 Mar
On January 7, 2026, Dr. Wayne Liu, president and chief growth officer of Perfect Corp., delivered a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) titled “API-First Innovation: Scalable AI for the Modern Beauty Shopper,” discussing the many different ways that AI is impacting the beauty industry. In the process, he makes a case for our ...
19 Mar
Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been absolutely everywhere since it was first released in November 2024. Sometimes referred to as the “USB-C of AI,” MCP has come forward to help tame some of AI’s most glaring issues, namely a lack of standardization around integration as well as the context to understand what it’s accessing. Given ...
18 Mar
If your application calls even one third-party API, its reliability ceiling is no longer yours to control. That is the uncomfortable truth behind the uptime numbers API Status Check has been tracking since late 2025 across more than 215 services spanning cloud infrastructure, AI, payments, developer tools, and communications. This is not a ranking exercise. ...
4 Mar
The evolution of the modern enterprise is often marked by a transition from streamlined simplicity to architectural fragmentation. What begins as a strategic move toward distributed systems frequently devolves into gateway sprawl, a phenomenon where decentralized business units adopt distinct API tools based on localized budgets, engineering preferences, or specific technical requirements. While this flexibility ...
26 Feb
Agentic AI systems promise something beyond single-turn inference. They can provide persistence, autonomy, and the ability to plan and act across time. However, anyone who’s tried to wire real APIs into an agent quickly discovers an uncomfortable reality. Even well-trained models can become jerky, brittle, or outright wrong once network calls, retries, partial failures, and ...
11 Feb
Nothing frustrates a user more than a slow or non-responsive website or application. This is especially true in ecommerce, where slow-loading pages lead to high bounce rates and lower conversion rates. Often, the hidden culprit behind delays is a high-latency API. Many app developers integrate multiple third-party APIs, cumulatively adding more latency. As more APIs ...
10 Feb
A product manager at a mid-sized SaaS company notices a familiar pattern. The mobile app team is blocked waiting for a backend change, the data team has built its own undocumented endpoints to move faster, and the DevOps team is fielding late-night incidents caused by services calling each other in unexpected ways. Each team is ...
28 Jan
In December 2025, roughly 14,000 Stranger Things fans experienced their worst nightmare. No, Vecna didn’t rise up to pull Hawkins, Indiana, into the Upside Down. Even worse, thousands of fans signed onto Netflix to watch the conclusion of the series they’d dedicated the last decade of their lives to, only to have the world’s largest ...
20 Jan
Model Context Protocol (MCP) had a banner year in 2025. Since MCP was first released in November 2024, the protocol has exploded with thousands of public MCP servers and millions of monthly SDK downloads. Everyone from Microsoft to Google has adopted MCP in their quest for agentic AI. However, right when MCP was celebrating its ...
31 Dec 2025
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was published in November 2024 and has seen tremendous success and adoption. That is not a big surprise, as AI is still very much trending, and MCP has turned into the glue that allows LLM-based applications to interact with resources and tools. Without MCP, LLMs remain in their closed worlds ...
10 Dec 2025
Choosing the right architectural style isn’t just a technical detail — it’s critical to the success of your API and every application that relies on it. The architecture determines how easily developers can understand and integrate your API, profoundly impacting their experience. It dictates how clients and servers communicate, directly affecting application efficiency, performance, and ...
9 Dec 2025
The tech space is often overly concerned with the new and flashy — it seems like every day, there is a new product release, a new iteration, some big new thing that secures headlines and coverage. But the reality is that there is a whole world of old protocols that are not only alive — ...
3 Dec 2025
Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data, is still a very new tech, and as such, it’s experiencing the same growth pains that any other technology experiences. In this process, certain use and design patterns are starting to emerge — and not always for the better. One ...
13 Nov 2025
In modern system architectures, understanding data flow is crucial. Two fundamental concepts are north-south and east-west communications. Although both deal with APIs and services, they solve fundamentally different problems and require distinct tools. Below, we’ll explore when to use API gateways or a service mesh for north-south and east-west traffic. We’ll consider when each approach ...
4 Nov 2025
We recently published an article about why developers should use an OpenAPI specification as a starting point for an MCP server. The piece led to an interesting discussion on LinkedIn about what makes an MCP server performant and useful. One critical piece is building tools that can orchestrate multiple API calls together for AI consumers. ...
23 Oct 2025
API documentation is the cornerstone of discoverability. Well-structured API documentation allows an API to be understood by humans as well as machines. It lets a system understand how the API is structured, what it does, and includes invaluable metadata for further filtering and sorting. This means that API documentation is equally vital for an API ...
13 Oct 2025
Real-world constraints often impact how we build digital services. This is especially true for enterprise APIs in regulated industries that transmit sensitive data across jurisdictions. Constraints around how data is managed can easily slow progress — but it doesn’t have to be that way. At Platform Summit 2025, Yinka Omole, a lead software engineer at ...
6 May 2024
Bazaarvoice has thousands of clients including brands and retailers. Bazaarvoice has billions of records of product catalog and User Generated Content(UGC)from Bazaarvoice clients. When a shopper visits a brand or retailer site/app powered by Bazaarvoice, our APIs are triggered. In 2023,Bazaarvoice UGC APIs recorded peak traffic of over 3+ billion calls per day with zero […]