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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

Adopting Memory-Safety and Fine-Grained Compartmentalisation with CHERI

David Chisnall discusses how the CHERI hardware architecture redefines pointer safety to solve isolation and sharing challenges. He explains how CHERI enables spatial and temporal memory safety for C/C++, scales down to microcontrollers with CHERIoT, and replaces costly OS-level RPC mechanisms with lightweight, auditable compartmentalization - all without requiring massive codebase rewrites.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Comprehension as an Architectural Characteristic: A System That Is Not Understood Cannot Evolve Safely

As AI commoditizes code output, system comprehension silently decays, creating cognitive debt that threatens safe architectural evolution. This article explores why human understanding must be treated as an essential architectural characteristic, offering actionable strategies, socio-technical metrics, and design checkpoints to preserve intent across modern engineering teams.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

The Right 300 Tokens Beat 100k Noisy Ones: The Architecture of Context Engineering

Baruch Sadogursky and Patrick Debois discuss why coding agents fail due to bloated context windows and stuffed prompts. They explain practical context engineering fixes, including lazy-loaded skills, versioned context artifacts, externalized memory banks, and LLM-as-a-judge evals. Software architects & engineering leaders will learn how to turn raw markdown files into reliable agentic workflows.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Founders, Friction, and Focus: Building Engineering Teams at Early-Stage Startups

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to David Gudeman about the unique culture of early-stage startup engineering, how founder personality quirks and premature process impositions can derail teams, and how engineers can build influence and make deliberate career choices without formal power.

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.

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.

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 Smalltalk Dave about Programming Languages, SOA, MDA and the Web

Smalltalk Dave about Programming Languages, SOA, MDA and the Web

23:29

Bio

Dave Thomas is the managing director of Object Mentor, founder and chairman of Bedarra Research Labs and adjunct research professor at Carleton University and the University Of Queensland. He is known as founder and past CEO of Object Technology International Inc., a pioneer company in Agile development, and has been involved with the Eclipse IDE, the IBM virtual machine and Smalltalk tooling.

About the conference

Apr 25, 2008

Interview with

Dave Thomas

by

Floyd Marinescu

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