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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

Go Channels: Understanding Happens-Before for Safe Concurrency

This article dives into the happens-before semantics of Go channels, explaining how they relate to memory visibility, synchronization, and concurrency correctness. We'll examine subtle pitfalls, illustrate them with examples, and explore the architectural implications for system designers.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Scaling API Independence: Mocking, Contract Testing & Observability in Large Microservices Environments

Tom Akehurst explains strategies for overcoming microservice pain points like environment dependency and slow development. He advocates using realistic API simulation at scale, supported by contract testing , API observability, and GenAI integration. Learn to compose observations, simulations, and contracts to maximize confidence and reduce the toil of maintaining realistic, up-to-date mocks.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Achieving Precision in AI: Retrieving the Right Data Using AI Agents

Adi Polak explains the path from GenAI prototype to production by focusing on precision - the competitive edge. She details Agentic RAG architectures, emergent agent design patterns, and crucial feedback loops (LLM-as-a-judge) for refinement. Learn how to leverage data streaming (Kafka) to manage collaboration, memory, and scale microservices in real-time agent systems.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Shine Bright as an IC: Growing Yourself as Your Company Grows

Suhail Patel discusses how senior engineers and tech leaders must go beyond technical mastery to achieve staff-plus growth. He explains how to leverage one-to-ones, intentional interviewing (as learning opportunities), and visible writing to build influence and your network. Get practical advice on making ambitious bets and fixing organizational cracks to grow your team and company.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

You Are Asking the Wrong Questions (About Reliability and SRE)

David Blank-Edelman (Microsoft SRE Academy) explains 7 essential questions to elevate your reliability practice. He challenges engineering leaders to redefine reliability metrics beyond availability, replace "root cause" with contributing factors, critique the 5 whys, re-evaluate the true goals of toil automation, and understand SRE's role (firefighting vs. partnership).

All in devops

Events

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QCon San Francisco 2025

Get production-proven patterns from the leaders who scaled a GenAI search platform to millions, migrated a core ML system without downtime, and architected a global streaming service from the ground up.

Early Bird ends Nov 11.

QCon AI New York 2025

Move beyond AI demos to real engineering impact. Discover how teams embed LLMs, govern models, and scale inference pipelines to accelerate development securely.

Early Bird ends Nov 11.

QCon London 2026

Benchmark your systems against leading engineering teams. See what really works in FinOps, modern Java, and distributed data architectures to balance cost, scale, and reliability.

Early Bird ends Nov 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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