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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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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

Building Resilient Platforms: Insights from Over Twenty Years in Mission-Critical Infrastructure

Building resilient platforms requires understanding the art and science of creating infrastructure that others depend on for critical applications. This perspective applies to anyone who builds software consumed by others at scale. Whether developing infrastructure platforms, software development platforms, or messaging systems, principles address how to build software that others consume at scale

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Growing and Cultivating Strong Machine Learning Engineers

Vivek Gupta shares best practices for managing and mentoring ML engineers, from early-career development to senior leadership growth. He breaks down the crucial, distinct skills for Production Machine Learning, including data/model management, building training pipelines, LLM prompt evaluation, privacy/security, and integrating human-in-the-loop processes for reliable, scalable AI 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 seven 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 five 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 Ken Little on Scaling Tumblr

Ken Little on Scaling Tumblr

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13:00

Bio

Ken is an engineer at Tumblr where he works with both the frontend and backend teams to build out the next generation of high scalability infrastructure. Prior to joining Tumblr, Ken worked as an Engineering Director at Etsy where he drove the implementation of a sharded data architecture, helping the site achieve new heights in throughput and availability. He blogs at http://61cygni.tumblr.com/

About the conference

Software is changing the world; QCon aims to empower software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the enterprise software development community; to achieve this, QCon is organized as a practitioner-driven conference designed for people influencing innovation in their teams: team leads, architects, project managers, engineering directors.

Sep 24, 2012

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