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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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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

APIs for Agents: Rethinking API Programs in the MCP Era

Jim Gough and Andreea Niculcea explain how Morgan Stanley uses Architecture as Code with CALM to modernize its API program. They demonstrate integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communications, enforcing automated governance through deployment gates, and executing zero-downtime platform upgrades to safely scale enterprise AI and agentic workflows.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

The Agent Harness: Control Planes, Invariants, and Approval Boundaries for Production AI Agents

OpenAI’s Vinoth Govindarajan discusses why production AI agents fail beyond model hallucination. Using real-world case studies like OpenClaw, he explains the key principles of reliable agent harnesses: establishing explicit state ownership, serializing concurrent state mutations, scoping execution authority, and validating actions at the user-visible edge.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Maximizing Success with Limited Time, Resources, and Energy: Lessons from Startup Engineering

David Gudeman discusses battle-tested architectural patterns for resource-constrained engineering teams. Drawing from over a decade of startup experience, he explains how pairing GCP, Firebase, and Cloud Run accelerates product-market fit. Learn how to eliminate redundant frontend state, structure event-driven backends, and maintain lean DevOps while building for long-term scalability.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Securing AI Agents: Identity, Authorization, and the DPACT Framework

In this episode, Sahil Agarwal talks about the critical challenges of identity, authorisation, and security in the age of AI agents. Sahil introduces the DPACT framework (Delegation, Policy, Auditability, Context, and Time) as a blueprint for building responsible, guardrailed agentic systems, moving away from simple token-based access toward bounded, delegated authority.

All in devops

Events

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Architect Certification

Distributed systems, decentralized decisions, platform engineering, and AI architecture.
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.

AI-Assisted Engineering Certification

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

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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