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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

Building a Session-Ordered Kafka Pipeline in Go

The article describes a custom implementation that provides a session-level ordering on top of Apache Kafka partitions, supporting strict message ordering across 1000s of independent channels. The solution required application-level routing, consistent hashing, retries, and contiguous watermark commits. Engineers conducted operational hardening supported by extensive performance testing.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Building Reusable Evaluation Frameworks for Agentic AI Products

Susan Chang explains how Elastic transitioned from siloed, ad-hoc AI agent evaluations to a unified, production-grade framework. She discusses balancing LLM-as-a-judge with deterministic rules, bridging Python data science evals with TypeScript production code, and implementing deep tracing to catch regressions across complex RAG and cybersecurity workloads while preserving domain context.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

The Reinvention of the Dev Team

Hannah Foxwell shares how the surge of agentic coding forces engineering leaders to rethink team dynamics. She discusses three key anchors for navigating AI-driven velocity: building software worth building, prioritizing automated safety over speed, and preserving the human element through generalist "broken comb" skillsets and sustainable on-call practices.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Building Resilient Platforms: Insights from 20+ Years in Mission-Critical Infrastructure

Matthew Liste explains the 12 core principles of building scalable, reliable platforms for enterprise tech teams. From avoiding technical debt and managing deprecation to building a strong engineering culture, Liste discusses how to design infrastructure platforms that reduce complexity, streamline developer workflows, and deliver long-term value for senior architects and engineering leaders.

All in devops

Events

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Architect Certification

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

AI-Assisted Engineering Certification

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

High-Performing Teams Certification

Compare team design, delivery flow, AI roles, and metrics with experienced practitioners.
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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.

QCon AI Boston

Learn from the decisions and trade-offs behind AI systems already running in production.
Registration open.

InfoQ Homepage Interviews Esther Derby on Language, Communication and Change

Esther Derby on Language, Communication and Change

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21:46

Bio

Esther Derby started her career as a programmer and over the years has worn many hats including business owner, internal consultant and manager. She has spent the last 25 years helping companies design their environment, culture and human dynamics for optimum success. She is the co-author of 2 books: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management

About the conference

Each year Agile Alliance brings together attendees, speakers, authors, luminaries, and industry analysts from around the world in a one-of-a-kind conference. The Conference is considered the premier Agile event of the year, and provides a week-long opportunity to engage in wide-open interaction, collaboration and sharing of ideas with peers and colleagues within the global Agile community.

Feb 21, 2014

Interview with

Esther Derby

by

Craig Smith

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