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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

Adopting Memory-Safety and Fine-Grained Compartmentalisation with CHERI

David Chisnall discusses how the CHERI hardware architecture redefines pointer safety to solve isolation and sharing challenges. He explains how CHERI enables spatial and temporal memory safety for C/C++, scales down to microcontrollers with CHERIoT, and replaces costly OS-level RPC mechanisms with lightweight, auditable compartmentalization - all without requiring massive codebase rewrites.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Understanding Progressive Collapse: How To Avoid A Cascading Failure

Sam Newman discusses the concept of progressive collapse in civil engineering and how it applies to distributed systems. Using real-world examples - from the 1968 Ronan Point tower failure to AWS outages - he shares crucial resilience engineering strategies for software leaders. Learn how to strengthen components, isolate failures, and reduce interconnections to prevent catastrophic cascades.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

From Fab To Token - The State Of The Market

Jordan Nanos discusses how semiconductor constraints, data center expansion, and networking bottlenecks impact AI software architecture. Drawing from SemiAnalysis research, he shares insights on benchmark performance, GPU scaling, and tokenomics from chip fab to model inference.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Turning Outward: Growing From Code to Influence

Brad Grantham discusses how software engineers and architects can transition from individual contributors to influential technical leaders. Brad shares actionable insights on expanding skills into business and legal domains, adapting communication styles for non-technical stakeholders, moving past ego to empower teams, and navigating complex organizational dynamics to maximize engineering impact.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Why Fetch When You Can Sync? Building Local-First Apps on a Sync Engine Architecture

James Arthur shares why sync is the next frontier in frontend architecture. He explains how extending reactivity to the server with Electric and TanStack DB replaces imperative fetching with declarative data bindings. Learn how query-driven sync and local optimistic updates enable engineering leaders to build insanely fast, collaborative, and agentic applications using their existing stack.

All in devops

Events

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AI Security & Privacy Engineering Certification

Secure and govern production AI systems, from sensitive data to guardrails, evals, and audits.
Online. Register now.

Architect Certification

Distributed systems, decentralized decisions, platform engineering, and AI architecture.
Online. Register Now.

Engineering Leadership Certification

Work through leadership decisions with senior peers facing similar technical trade-offs.
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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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QCon San Francisco

What's working across AI, architecture, and leadership, from the teams doing it.
Register. Early bird ends August 11.

QCon AI New York

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

QCon London

What early-adopter teams have proven in production, across 15 engineering tracks.
Register. Early bird ends August 11.

InfoQ Homepage Interviews Neal Gafter Discusses Closures, Language Features and Optional Typing

Neal Gafter Discusses Closures, Language Features and Optional Typing

25:56

Bio

Neal Gafter is a software engineer and Java evangelist at Google. He was previously a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he designed and implemented the Java language features in releases 1.4 through 5.0. Neal is coauthor of "Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases" (Addison Wesley, 2005).

About the conference

Aug 11, 2008

Interview with

Neal Gafter

by

Ryan Slobojan

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