BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Register Sign in

Unlock the full InfoQ experience

Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with content, and download exclusive resources.

Log In

or

Don't have an InfoQ account?

Stay updated on topics and peers that matter to youReceive instant alerts on the latest insights and trends.
Quickly access free resources for continuous learningMinibooks, videos with transcripts, and training materials.
Save articles and read at anytimeBookmark articles to read whenever youre ready.

Logo - Back to homepage

News Articles Presentations Podcasts Guides

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

Multi-Agent Patterns from Spotify’s AI Powered Advertising Platform

Pratik Rasam discusses how Spotify Ads Manager runs production-grade multi-agent systems at scale using Google ADK Java. He shares key architectural patterns, domain ownership models, deterministic guardrails, and tracing-based evaluation strategies, detailing hard-learned lessons on drawing agent boundaries, optimizing tool schemas, and managing costs while avoiding monolithic agent pitfalls.

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

Helpful links

Choose your language

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?
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.

High-Performing Teams Certification

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

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 Systems Thinking for Management

Systems Thinking for Management

Download

29:38

Bio

Esther Derby is a consultant, speaker and author who lives in Minneapolis, MN. She helps managers manage better and works with companies who want to do better at delivering valuable software to their customers. She is co-author of two books–Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. Read some of her many articles at www.estherderby.com

About the conference

The Agile Alliance organizes the Agile series conference, which bring together all the key people in the Agile space to talk about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of agile software development.

Oct 11, 2011

Interview with

Esther Derby

by

Shane Hastie

BT