InfoQ Homepage GOTO Conference Content on InfoQ
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How Lightweight ADRs and Architectural Advice Forums Can Support Architectural Decisions
How we decide is at the core of architecture, and the architecture advice process is a way to decentralize architectural decisions. It needs to be supported by Architecture Decision Records because of the speed at which technology and systems move, and can be complemented by a weekly architecture advice forum.
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Accountability is the Goal for AI, with EU Regulations Supporting Transparency
AI bias mirrors human bias; both stem from our language and lived experiences. Ethics and AI are inseparable, but AI changes affordances, making harmful actions easier to carry out. The EU regulations apply to AI, since digital products are products. The ultimate goal is accountability: companies must ensure transparency, and laws should favor using the simplest AI that gets the job done.
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How Platform Engineering Using Golden Bricks Can Enable Fast and Smooth Delivery
Platform engineering should have a product focus, as developers are customers; they must provide composable, self-service capabilities, golden bricks rather than rigid golden paths, so teams can move quickly while maintaining consistency. Success is measured through adoption, developer experience, and business outcomes such as deployment frequency and change failure rate.
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Applying Best Simple System for Now for Software Design
Choosing between building up technical debt and missing delivery deadlines is a false dichotomy, Daniel Terhorst-North argued in his talk Best Simple System for Now. Programmers love to generalize rather than solve the immediate problem at hand, which can make future changes difficult. Instead, we need to build the skills and instincts for keeping things simple.
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How Observability and Telemetry Can Enhance the Practice of Software Engineering
Observability must evolve with serverless, event-driven architectures. OpenTelemetry can decouple telemetry from vendors, letting developers emit consistent, high-quality data that explains real system behavior. Shared vocabularies and good telemetry make debugging faster and improve reliability, speed, and developer productivity.
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Platform as a Product: Delivering Value While Balancing Competing Priorities
Software platforms must be treated as products. Success requires balancing engineering, design, usability, security, and value for internal customers and the organisation, Abby Bangser mentioned in her talk Platform as a Product. A product mindset, clear ownership, and continuous investment prevent bottlenecks, platform decay, and wasted effort, enabling scalable, sustainable value over time.
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Decentralizing Architectural Decisions with the Architecture Advice Process
Our system architectures have changed as technology and development practices have evolved, but the way we practice architecture hasn’t kept up. According to Andrew Harmel-Law, architecture needs to be decentralized, similar to how we have decentralized our systems. The alternative to having an architect take and communicate decisions is to “let anyone make the decisions” using the advice process.
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Taking the Technical Leadership Path
Technical leaders face challenges beyond individual contributor work: aligning with business on investments, managing systemic aspects, mentoring, and keeping up with a changing codebase. We need technical alignment—shared codestyle, implementation patterns, and standards—to avoid accidental complexity. Leadership grows through practicing skills, improving team issues, and acting as a role model.
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Things Software Developers Think They Don’t Need to Care about, But Can Impact Their Job
Holly Cummins gave a keynote at Goto Copenhagen where she urged developers to care about overlooked issues that shape their work. She warned of unintended consequences of design decisions, promoted systems thinking and statistical literacy, stressed mastering concurrency as hardware evolves beyond Moore’s Law, and mentioned the impact of AI on the job market.
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How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Us Connect with Customers
In software development, success means going beyond meeting requirements. We must create products that surprise and delight users and are innovative, create impactful solutions, Ken Hughes said in the keynote “Connection is Everything”. AI can help us connect with customers and create better user experiences.
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Large Scale Experimentation at Spotify
When you want to scale the number of A/B tests to do many experiments at the same time, you need to adopt your processes and platform, and it might also impact your culture. Doing product research with controlled experiments helps to confront your ideas about how customers will use your product in reality, and check if those ideas actually impact user behaviour.
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Open Source Development at the UK Government
New code developed for GOV.UK will be open by default. Coding in the open enables reuse and increases transparency. The UK government wants to provide digital services which are so good that people want to use them; services which are leading to better interaction between the government and citizen.
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Getting the Data Needed for Data Science
Data science is about the data that you need; deciding which data to collect, create, or keep is fundamental argues Lukas Vermeer, an experienced Data Science professional and Product Owner for Experimentation at Booking.com. True innovation starts with asking big questions, then it becomes apparent which data is needed to find the answers you seek.
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Using Models in Developing Software for Self-Driving Cars
Models play an important role in developing software for autonomous systems like self-driving cars; they are used to simulate and verify behavior, document the system, and generate code. Jonathan Sprinkle explains how to model software used in autonomous systems, the benefits of modeling, using test data to validate the software that drives a car and techniques for writing reliable code.
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Becoming a Responsive Enterprise
Software-driven companies are taking over the world because they are responsive organizations, built on 'sense and respond' instead of 'plan and predict'. In the next decade every large scale organization will be digitized and will effectively become a software-driven enterprise. Vikram Kapoor, CEO at Prowareness, explored how organizations can increase their responsiveness.