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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

Implementing Durable Workflows on Postgres Without an External Orchestrator

Postgres can serve as the durable state store and coordination layer for workflows, eliminating the need for an external orchestrator. SKIP LOCKED enables concurrent work processing, primary-key checkpoints enforce idempotency, and leases support crash recovery. Workflow sleeps and human approvals can also be persisted as database state and survive restarts.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Context Engineering at LinkedIn: How We Built an Organizational Context Layer for AI Agents with MCP

Ajay Prakash discusses how LinkedIn overcomes AI agent limitations in large codebases. He explains Contextual Agent Playbooks and Tools - built on Model Context Protocol (MCP) - which serves procedural memory, code search, and runbooks directly to coding agents. Prakash shares architectural details and operational guardrails that deliver a 20% productivity boost with zero loss in reliability.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Complexity and Creativity in Software Engineering

Phillip Mortimer discusses the shift toward write-only software driven by AI code generation. He explains why traditional pull requests are broken and shares how engineering leaders can manage complexity by decoupling intent from implementation, automating code reviews, and building self-healing architecture to unleash developer creativity across senior engineering and architecture teams.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

When Incidents Refuse to End

Vanessa Huerta Granda explains how marathon incidents expose the gap between work as imagined and work as done. Drawing from real-world scenarios, she shares how complex outages reveal organizational fragility, human limits, and system interdependencies—and why incident response requires structured endurance, humane rotations, and holistic cross-functional coordination.

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.

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 Stephen Thair on Enterprise DevOps and Cultural Change

Stephen Thair on Enterprise DevOps and Cultural Change

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26:08

Bio

Stephen Thair loves website operations. He’s pretty much done every job from pulling thin Ethernet cabling through floor spaces, racking servers, deploying websites, killer load testing through to managing high-performing web ops teams for major UK online brands.

About the conference

Software is Changing the World. QCon empowers software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the developer community. A practitioner-driven conference, QCon is designed for technical team leads, architects, engineering directors, and project managers who influence innovation in their teams.

Jun 14, 2015

Interview with

Stephen Thair

by

Manuel Pais

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