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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

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

Decision Models in Agentic Architectures: From Production to Agent Skills

Alex Porcelli discusses the critical gap in enterprise AI: non-deterministic output and lack of accountability in high-stakes decisions. He shares how integrating DMN decision models with LLMs, agent skills, and NeMo guardrails creates auditable, deterministic agentic architectures - allowing business leaders to own decision logic while engineers maintain robust architectural governance.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Personality Over Skillset: How Adam Wachtel Builds Engineering Teams

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Adam Wachtel, CTO at Click Boarding, about hiring for personality and problem-solving over pure skillset, turning around a platform and team in crisis, and how AI is reshaping team size and composition without ending SAAS.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Platform Engineering in the Age of AI

The panelists explain how platform teams adapt to support AI-assisted engineering, highlighting which capabilities belong in the platform. They discuss trade-offs between standardization and developer autonomy, while sharing strategies to manage AI tooling, security guardrails, and shifting workflows.

All in devops

Events

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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 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 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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