BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Register Sign in

Unlock the full InfoQ experience

Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with content, and download exclusive resources.

Log In

or

Don't have an InfoQ account?

Stay updated on topics and peers that matter to youReceive instant alerts on the latest insights and trends.
Quickly access free resources for continuous learningMinibooks, videos with transcripts, and training materials.
Save articles and read at anytimeBookmark articles to read whenever youre ready.

Logo - Back to homepage

News Articles Presentations Podcasts Guides

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

Implementing Durable Workflows on Postgres without an External Orchestrator

Postgres can serve as the durable state store and coordination layer for workflows, eliminating the need for an external orchestrator. SKIP LOCKED enables concurrent work processing, primary-key checkpoints enforce idempotency, and leases support crash recovery. Workflow sleeps and human approvals can also be persisted as database state and survive restarts.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Context Engineering at LinkedIn: How We Built an Organizational Context Layer for AI Agents with MCP

Ajay Prakash discusses how LinkedIn overcomes AI agent limitations in large codebases. He explains Contextual Agent Playbooks and Tools - built on Model Context Protocol (MCP) - which serves procedural memory, code search, and runbooks directly to coding agents. Prakash shares architectural details and operational guardrails that deliver a 20% productivity boost with zero loss in reliability.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Complexity and Creativity in Software Engineering

Phillip Mortimer discusses the shift toward write-only software driven by AI code generation. He explains why traditional pull requests are broken and shares how engineering leaders can manage complexity by decoupling intent from implementation, automating code reviews, and building self-healing architecture to unleash developer creativity across senior engineering and architecture teams.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

When Incidents Refuse to End

Vanessa Huerta Granda explains how marathon incidents expose the gap between work as imagined and work as done. Drawing from real-world scenarios, she shares how complex outages reveal organizational fragility, human limits, and system interdependencies—and why incident response requires structured endurance, humane rotations, and holistic cross-functional coordination.

All in devops

Events

Helpful links

Choose your language

Architect Certification

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

AI Security & Privacy Engineering Certification

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

AI-Assisted Engineering Certification

Your coding agent moves fast. Who checks whether it's making the codebase better?
Online. Register Now.

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.
Register. Early bird ends Oct 13.

QCon London

What early-adopter teams have proven in production, across 15 engineering tracks.
Register. Early bird ends Oct 13.

InfoQ Homepage Interviews Jim Highsmith on Adaptive Leadership

Jim Highsmith on Adaptive Leadership

Download

19:04

Bio

Jim Highsmith is an executive consultant with ThoughtWorks, Inc., having spent 30-plus years as an IT manager, product manager, project manager, consultant, and software developer. In 2005 he was honored to receive international Stevens Award for outstanding contributions to systems development. Jim is coauthor of the Agile Manifesto and a founding member of The AgileAlliance.

About the conference

The Agile Alliance organizes the Agile series conference, which bring together all the key people in the Agile space to talk about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of agile software development.

Feb 16, 2012

Interview with

Jim Highsmith

by

Michael Floyd

BT