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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

The Free-Lunch Guide to Idea Circularity

Holly Cummins discusses why "nothing is new under the sun" in tech. She maps historical architectural tradeoffs to modern cloud, microservices, and AI hype cycles. She connects financial debt (post-ZIRP) and technical debt to epistemic and sleep debt, showing engineering leaders how to navigate shifts in assumptions, embrace sustainability, and revive proven engineering disciplines.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

From ms to µs: OSS Valkey Architecture Patterns for Modern AI

Dumanshu Goyal discusses optimizing data layers for low-latency workloads like AI feature stores. Drawing lessons from NASA's Space Shuttle, he explains how proxy architectures introduce hidden CPU costs, elevated tail latencies, and blast-radius risks. He demonstrates how direct-access Valkey architectures achieve microsecond latency, improve resilience, and slash infrastructure costs.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Keeping ChatGPT Fast as AI Development Accelerates

Martin Spier explains how agentic workflows dramatically increase code change volume at OpenAI. He discusses the hidden systemic performance costs of rapid shipping beyond GPUs, and shares how deploying always-on AI agents automates profiling, regression detection, and continuous optimization to maintain product speed and scalability at massive global scale.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

InfoQ Culture and Methods Trends Report - 2026

This report summarizes how the InfoQ Culture and Methods editorial team sees the ongoing and emergent trends in the culture and methods space in 2026.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Platform Engineering for Everyone - Success Can’t Be Coded

Max Korbacher explains why successful internal development platforms cannot be built on tech alone. He discusses the pitfalls of infrastructure-first thinking, the importance of a clear product mindset, and how to measure real value using DevEx and SPACE metrics. Learn how to align your team, manage tech debt, and foster a thriving community to ensure lasting platform adoption.

All in devops

Events

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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.

Architect Certification

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

Engineering Leadership Certification

Work through leadership decisions with senior peers facing similar technical trade-offs.
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QCon San Francisco

What's working across AI, architecture, and leadership, from the teams doing it.
Register. Early bird ends August 11.

QCon AI New York

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

QCon London

What early-adopter teams have proven in production, across 15 engineering tracks.
Register. Early bird ends August 11.

InfoQ Homepage Interviews Max Sklar on Machine Learning at Foursquare

Max Sklar on Machine Learning at Foursquare

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21:43

Bio

Max Sklar is an engineer and a machine learning specialist. At Foursquare, his objective is to constantly make the application smarter and more interesting for users. Before Foursquare, Max contributed to the emerging location-based social space with the creation of Stickymap. Max holds an M.S. in Information Systems from NYU, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale.

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.

Aug 09, 2012

Interview with

Max Sklar

by

Barry Burd

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