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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

Agentic AI Architecture: Current Challenges and Future Opportunities

Agentic AI architecture extends microservices and cloud-native architectures with AI agents that work with context, memory, and protocols such as MCP and A2A. The article covers bounded-context integration, task-dependent coordination strategies, new security risks, and observability needs. It expects gradual adoption alongside existing architectures, with platforms absorbing common components.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Batch Intelligence at Scale: Cost-Efficient Multi-Agent LLM Workflows with Built-In Resilience

Aditya Mulik explains how Walmart Global Tech deployed multi-agent LLM workflows across 4,700 stores for nightly batch inventory forecasting. He discusses tackling production hurdles - schema violations, cross-department data mismatches, and network drops - via MCP grounding and loop agents, while slashing cloud inference costs from $100k+ to $10k per month shifting from PTUs to pay-as-you-go.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

The Socio-Technical Staff+ Engineer: Architecture, Culture and Organisational Change

Vanessa Formicola shares how technical leaders can move beyond "wishful architecture" by practicing holistic socio-technical engineering. She discusses why engineering leaders must account for organizational maturity, reward structures, geopolitical climate, and team dynamics, framing the staff-plus role as designing the conditions for technology to thrive rather than just picking tools.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Uncorking Queueing Bottlenecks with OpenTelemetry

Oli Lane and Julian Wreford share how Gearset replaced guesswork in distributed asynchronous queues with OpenTelemetry tracing. They explain why traditional metrics fall short, how to implement user-centric SLOs based on latency distributions, and share practical debugging tips to help senior developers, software architects, and engineering leaders improve system reliability and team culture.

All in devops

Events

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AI Engineering Certification

Work through your production AI decisions with senior engineers from other companies. Apply their perspectives to challenges from your own work.
Online. Register Now.

AI Engineering Certification

Building RAG pipelines or AI agents? Work through retrieval, context, evals, and reliability decisions with experienced practitioners.
Online. Register Now.

High-Performing Teams Certification

Compare team design, delivery flow, AI roles, and metrics with experienced practitioners.
Online. Register Now.

Architect Certification

Distributed systems, decentralized decisions, platform engineering, and AI architecture.
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QCon San Francisco

What's working across AI, architecture, and leadership, from the teams doing it.
Register. Early bird ends Nov 10.

QCon AI New York

Production AI across agents, context, evals, security, and infrastructure, from the senior engineers building it.
Register. Early bird ends Nov 10.

QCon London

What early-adopter teams have proven in production, across 15 engineering tracks.
Register. Early bird ends Nov 10.

QCon AI Boston

Learn from the decisions and trade-offs behind AI systems already running in production.
Registration open.

InfoQ Homepage Interviews Luke Francl Explains Why Testing Is Overrated

Luke Francl Explains Why Testing Is Overrated

17:35

Bio

Luke Francl is a developer at Slantwise Design (http://slantwisedesign.com) and sometimes tech writer. Luke is a frequent presenter at the Ruby Users of Minnesota, and has also presented at CodeCon, MinneBar, Ostrava on Rails, and acts_as_conference. He blogs at Rail Spikes (http://railspikes.com) and Just Looking (http://justlooking.recursion.org).

About the conference

Feb 18, 2009

Interview with

Luke Francl

by

Rob Bazinet

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