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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

How to Find Resilience Bugs in Systems that Don't Exist

Hillel Wayne discusses how formal methods principles - such as property strength, state-space verification, and environment assumptions - help software engineers uncover critical architectural bugs early. He shares practical mental models like "adversarial non-determinism" to reason about concurrency, edge cases, and distributed system failures without needing complex mathematical tools.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

When Should You Use Liquid Clustering? Benchmarking Lakehouse Layout Strategies

Physical data layout is one of the most consequential decisions in lakehouse engineering. The author compares Liquid Clustering, ZOrdering, and partitioning across four workload types on Delta Lake, uncovering two undocumented failure modes that likely affect production systems today and offering a decision framework for choosing the right layout strategy.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

The Minimum Viable Manager: Building Trust, Feedback, and Alignment

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Matt Gjertsen, founder of Built and author of Minimum Viable Manager, about the three foundational skills every first-time manager needs, how to build trust and give effective feedback, and why human leadership skills matter even more in the age of AI.

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.
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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.
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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 Nov 10.

QCon AI New York

Production AI across agents, context, evals, security, and infrastructure, from the senior engineers building it.
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QCon London

What early-adopter teams have proven in production, across 15 engineering tracks.
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QCon AI Boston

Learn from the decisions and trade-offs behind AI systems already running in production.
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InfoQ Homepage Interviews Dave Thomas on Ruby, Rails and Choosing the Right Tool

Dave Thomas on Ruby, Rails and Choosing the Right Tool

22:31

Bio

Dave Thomas is recognized internationally as an expert who develops high-quality software--accurate and highly flexible systems. He helped write the now-famous Agile Manifesto, and regularly speak on new ways of producing software. He is the author of six books, including the best selling The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide.

About the conference

Dec 03, 2007

Interview with

Dave Thomas

by

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