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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

Accelerating Performance by Incrementally Integrating Rust into Existing Codebase

Lily Mara explains how to avoid high-risk software rewrites through incremental FFI refactoring. She shares how engineering teams can replace Python bottlenecks with Rust via PyO3, demonstrating how to achieve dramatic function-level speedups, seamless integration testing, and meaningful infrastructure cost savings without microservice overhead.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Building a Session-Ordered Kafka Pipeline in Go

The article describes a custom implementation that provides a session-level ordering on top of Apache Kafka partitions, supporting strict message ordering across 1000s of independent channels. The solution required application-level routing, consistent hashing, retries, and contiguous watermark commits. Engineers conducted operational hardening supported by extensive performance testing.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Multi-Agent Patterns from Spotify’s AI Powered Advertising Platform

Pratik Rasam discusses how Spotify Ads Manager runs production-grade multi-agent systems at scale using Google ADK Java. He shares key architectural patterns, domain ownership models, deterministic guardrails, and tracing-based evaluation strategies, detailing hard-learned lessons on drawing agent boundaries, optimizing tool schemas, and managing costs while avoiding monolithic agent pitfalls.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

The Reinvention of the Dev Team

Hannah Foxwell shares how the surge of agentic coding forces engineering leaders to rethink team dynamics. She discusses three key anchors for navigating AI-driven velocity: building software worth building, prioritizing automated safety over speed, and preserving the human element through generalist "broken comb" skillsets and sustainable on-call practices.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Building Resilient Platforms: Insights from 20+ Years in Mission-Critical Infrastructure

Matthew Liste explains the 12 core principles of building scalable, reliable platforms for enterprise tech teams. From avoiding technical debt and managing deprecation to building a strong engineering culture, Liste discusses how to design infrastructure platforms that reduce complexity, streamline developer workflows, and deliver long-term value for senior architects and engineering leaders.

All in devops

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Architect Certification

Distributed systems, decentralized decisions, platform engineering, and AI architecture.
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AI-Assisted Engineering Certification

Your coding agent moves fast. Who checks whether it's making the codebase better?
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AI Security & Privacy Engineering Certification

Secure and govern production AI systems, from sensitive data to guardrails, evals, and audits.
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High-Performing Teams Certification

Compare team design, delivery flow, AI roles, and metrics with experienced practitioners.
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QCon San Francisco

What's working across AI, architecture, and leadership, from the teams doing it.
Register. Early bird ends Oct 13.

QCon AI New York

Production AI across agents, context, evals, security, and infrastructure, from the senior engineers building it.
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QCon London

What early-adopter teams have proven in production, across 15 engineering tracks.
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QCon AI Boston

Learn from the decisions and trade-offs behind AI systems already running in production.
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InfoQ Homepage Interviews Guy Steele Interviews John McCarthy, Father of Lisp

Guy Steele Interviews John McCarthy, Father of Lisp

56:06

Bio

John McCarthy has been involved in Artificial Intelligence since 1948, a term he coined in 1955. He has been mainly interested in formalization of common sense knowledge. He designed LISP in 1958 and developed the concept of time-sharing. Among others, he has received the Turing Award, the Research Excellence Award, and the Kyoto Prize.

About the conference

Starting in 1986, OOPSLA Conference has proven to be the cradle of many techniques and methodologies that have become mainstream over the years: OOP, Patterns, AOP, XP, Unit Testing, UML, Wiki, and Refactoring. Gaining its prestige with 3 academic tracks, OOPSLA Conference has managed to attract researchers, educators and developers every year. The event is sponsored by ACM.

May 01, 2009

Interview with

John McCarthy

by

Guy Steele

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