InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
How Pair Programming Enhanced Development Speed, Focus, and Flow
Ola Hast and Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom gave a talk about continuous delivery with pair programming at QCon London. Their team uses pair and mob programming with TDD; there are no solo tasks or separate code reviews. This approach boosts code quality, reduces waste, and enables the sharing of knowledge. Frequent breaks help to maintain focus and flow.
-
From C to Rust: inside Meta’s Developer-Led Messaging Migration
Meta has begun rewriting its mobile messaging infrastructure in Rust, gradually replacing a legacy C codebase that engineers say had become increasingly difficult to maintain and frustrating to work with.
-
Experiences from Using AI as a Software Architect
Artificial intelligence excels at refining language and processing large text volumes, but lacks human-like contextual reasoning and emotional intelligence, Avraham Poupko said. Many human traits come into play when doing software architecture. As an architect, he suggests using AI for exploring tradeoffs and refining language with clarity and precision.
-
The Rise of Energy and Water Consumption Using AI Models, and How It Can Be Reduced
Artificial intelligence's (AI) energy and water consumption has become a growing concern in the tech industry, particularly for large-scale machine learning models and data centers. Sustainable AI focuses on making AI technology more environmentally friendly and socially responsible.
-
How Software Engineers Can Grow Their Career
To grow their career, Bruno Rey suggests that software engineers should develop ambition, increase their capacity, and seek opportunities. He advises being proactive, broadening your influence by learning from peers, and stepping outside your comfort zone. Software engineers can keep a brag doc to ensure that their work is visible and plan their growth with realistic long-term goals.
-
DevSummit Boston: Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry
At the InfoQ Dev Summit, Google’s Engineering Director Michelle Brush addressed software leaders, emphasizing the evolving landscape of software engineering amidst rising automation. She championed a shift toward higher-level cognitive skills, systems thinking, and foundational knowledge, urging engineers to embrace complexity for enhanced resilience and decision-making in their work.
-
Applying Observability to Leadership to Understand and Explain your Way of Working
Leadership observability means observing yourself as you lead, treating yourself as the system that is under observation. Alex Schladebeck shared how narrating thoughts, using mind maps, asking questions, and identifying patterns helped her as a leader to explain decisions, check bias, support others, and understand her actions and challenges.
-
How to Develop Your Skills to Become a Principal Engineer
Becoming a principal engineer requires more than technical skill, it’s about influence, communication, and strategy. Success means enabling teams by shaping culture, Sophie Weston said. She suggested developing deep skills in multiple domains, with collaborative skills. Skills from life outside work, like sports, volunteering, or gaming, can add valuable perspective and build leadership potential.
-
How a Sociotechnical Approach Can Help to Deal with Complexity
Today’s software professionals navigate a maze of technical, business, and social complexity. According to Xin Yao, thriving in this environment requires more than just technical and business expertise. We need fluency in decoupling systems for maintainability, reconnecting them for business value, and working with the messiness of organizational dynamics.
-
Why We Should Care about Accessible Websites and How to Do It
Web accessibility ensures content is usable by people with disabilities. According to Joanna Falkowska, it can give a competitive edge, improve SEO, and support basic human rights. She emphasizes using WCAG standard and making accessibility a shared team responsibility from the start of development, to prevent costly fixes later in the process.
-
Expanding Continuous Improvement beyond Agile Practices
After being on an agile journey where practices were centered on IT, a company is now exploring ways to extend them beyond IT and scale their approach. Ramya Sriram presented how they focus on continuous improvement through agile practices, feedback, and customized maturity assessments. Emphasizing flow metrics with a strong learning culture, they aim for efficiency and sustainable growth.
-
Using Social Drivers to Improve Software Engineering Team Performance
According to Lizzie Matusov, technical drivers like velocity offer an incomplete view of team performance. Social drivers—trust, autonomy, purpose, and psychological safety—provide a fuller picture and reveal important areas of opportunity for improvement. She spoke about the social drivers behind high-performing engineering teams at QCon San Francisco.
-
Cultivating a Culture of Resilience in Software Organizations
Resilience helps individuals and organizations respond to challenges. Personal resilience is built through adapting, technical resilience by mastering a variety of tools, and organizational resilience through flexibility and strong networks. In fast-changing software industries, recognizing tech shifts and fostering learning, flexibility, and collaboration, enhances resilience.
-
Mezzalira at QCon London: Micro-Frontends from Design to Organisational Benefits and Deployments
During his QCon London presentation, Luca Mezzalira, principal architect at AWS, shared his experience in building the ideal micro frontend platform. He disclosed the recipe for determining if micro frontends are right for your company, as well as the core principles of creating the perfect architecture for your use case, and also provided deployment strategies for distributed architectures.
-
How Developers Can Eliminate Software Waste and Reduce Climate Impact
High performance and sustainability correlate; making software go faster by improving the efficiency of algorithms can reduce energy requirements, Holly Cummins said at QCon London. She suggested switching systems off when not in use to reduce the environmental footprint. Developers can achieve more by doing less, improving productivity, she said.