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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

The Rust High Performance Talk You Did Not Expect

Ruth Linehan explains how migrating high-performance caching services from Kotlin to Rust shattered internal preconceptions around delivery velocity and engineering overhead. She discusses the ergonomics of the Rust borrow checker, shares how compile-time safety shortens the developer feedback loop, and profiles how tools like Criterion and flamegraphs optimize concurrent code paths.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Compiling Workflows into Databases: The Architecture That Shouldn't Work (But Does)

Jeremy Edberg & Qian Li discuss why external orchestrators decrease reliability and how to use your existing database for durable execution. They share how DBOS Transact uses standard tables, SKIP LOCKED queues, and unique primary keys to manage complex, fault-tolerant AI workflows with minimal latency, all without the operational overhead of separate distributed systems.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Autonomous Data Products for the Autonomous Era: Rethinking Data Architecture for GenAI

Jörg Schad explains how to tame the complex "data management hairball" to build scalable, safe architectures for AI. He shares how autonomous data products act like containers for data, encapsulating pipelines, schemas, and metadata. Discover how progressive tool discovery via protocols like MCP limits context rot, enforces governance policies, and ensures reliable, multi-modal access.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Road to Compliance: Will Your Internal Users Hate Your Platform Team?

Davide de Paolis discusses the realities of rolling out cloud infrastructure compliance without fracturing developer relations. Drawing from a real-world platform team reboot at Sevdesk, he explains how to implement "minimum viable governance" on AWS, utilize event-driven Slack alerting to automate policy feedback, and shift from rigid enforcement to high-empathy, data-driven collaboration.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Platform Engineering for Everyone - Success Can’t Be Coded

Max Korbacher explains why successful internal development platforms cannot be built on tech alone. He discusses the pitfalls of infrastructure-first thinking, the importance of a clear product mindset, and how to measure real value using DevEx and SPACE metrics. Learn how to align your team, manage tech debt, and foster a thriving community to ensure lasting platform adoption.

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.

AI Engineering Certification

Production AI calls on retrieval, agents, evals, and infrastructure, checked with peers.
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.
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 Esther Derby on Coaching Upwards and Still No Silver Bullet

Esther Derby on Coaching Upwards and Still No Silver Bullet

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13:26

Bio

Esther Derby is well known for her work in helping teams grow to new levels of productivity. She helps teams and organizations make the transition to agile, and coaches technical people who are making the transition to management. Esther is recognized as one of the world's leaders in retrospectives, and is co-author (with Diana Larsen) of the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great.

About the conference

Every day, Agile practitioners and thought leaders are defining and refining new and existing practices that bring Agile’s values and principles to our world of work, play and service. Agile2014 reinforces our understanding of proven methods and illuminates some of the exciting new innovations that represent the future of Agile.

Dec 15, 2014

Interview with

Esther Derby

by

Shane Hastie

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