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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

From VR to Flat Screens: Bridging the Input and Immersion Gap

Dany Lepage discusses the architectural journey of porting a hit VR title to seven non-VR platforms. He explains how his team solved the challenges of cross-progression, diverse input paradigms, and maintaining release velocity across Steam, iOS, and PlayStation. Beyond the tech, he shares candid lessons on the "product fit" gap when translating immersive social presence to 2D screens.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Stripe’s Docdb: How Zero-Downtime Data Movement Powers Trillion-Dollar Payment Processing

Jimmy Morzaria discusses the evolution of Stripe’s database tier to support 5 million QPS with 5.5 nines of reliability. He explains the architecture of DocDB and shares how Stripe leverages a custom zero-downtime data movement platform to perform horizontal sharding, version upgrades, and multi-tenant migrations - all while maintaining the strict consistency required for global commerce.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

What I Learned Building Multi-Agent Systems From Scratch

Paulo Arruda discusses Shopify’s evolution in AI adoption, moving from simple chat tools to a sophisticated swarm of specialized agents. He explains the transition from massive "all-in-one" prompts to lean, narrow-focused agent microservices that slash task times from hours to minutes. He also shares a future-looking hypothesis on using filesystem-based adapters to solve context bloat.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Beyond Coding: How Senior ICs Grow Influence and Drive Impact

Netflix’s Kasia Trapszo discusses the transition from writing code to scaling organizations. She shares lessons on building trust through technical clarity, aligning teams to solve the "right" problems, and using intentional documentation to scale your judgment. Learn how to move beyond individual output to create a lasting architectural legacy that empowers others to make better decisions.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

The Mathematics of Backlogs: Capacity Planning for Queue Recovery

Backlogs in distributed systems are arithmetic problems, not mysteries. This article provides practical formulas for calculating backlog drain time, sizing consumer headroom, and setting auto-scaling triggers. It covers key failure modes — retry amplification, metastable states, and cascading pipeline bottlenecks — plus when to shed load instead of draining.

All in devops

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Online InfoQ Architect Certification

The more senior you become, the fewer people pressure-test your decisions. This 5-week cohort gives you that check.

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Learn how leading engineering teams run AI in production—reliably, securely, and at scale.

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Online InfoQ AI Engineering Certification

A practical online cohort for senior engineers making decisions around retrieval, agents, evals, and AI infrastructure.

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QCon San Francisco

Learn what's next in AI and software, from teams already doing it.

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InfoQ Homepage Interviews Portia Tung on Enterprise Gardening and Overcoming Agile Adoption Challenges

Portia Tung on Enterprise Gardening and Overcoming Agile Adoption Challenges

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13:30

Bio

Portia Tung is a consultant-coach, storyteller, and games maker who combines business strategies with play to bring about positive organizational change. Portia is an international speaker, and the creator of concepts such as Agile Fairytales and Enterprise Gardening. She shares her insights and experiences as a coach and parent on her blog Selfish Programming.

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.

May 28, 2014

Interview with

Portia Tung

by

Shane Hastie

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