InfoQ Homepage QCon London 2026 Content on InfoQ
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QCon London 2026: AI Agents Write Your Code. What’s Left for Humans?
Hannah Foxwell began her QCon London 2026 talk by noting that the long-sought velocity in development has arrived, but the industry is unsure how to use it. She set aside the technical details of agentic coding, focusing instead on its implications for the people working with these systems.
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QCon London 2026: Tools That Enable the Next 1B Developers
At QCon London 2026, Ivan Zarea, director of platform engineering at Netlify, discussed the impact of AI on web development, noting a surge in non-traditional developers among the 11 million users on the platform. He presented three pillars for developer tools: developing expertise, honing taste, and practicing clairvoyance, emphasizing the need for thoughtful architecture in a evolving landscape.
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QCon London 2026: Shielding the Core: Architecting Resilience with Multi-Layer Defenses
Anderson Parra, staff software engineer at SeatGeek, presented “Shielding the Core: Architecting Resilience with Multi-Layer Defenses” at QCon London 2026. Parra discussed strategies on how to handle significant traffic spikes in systems that can overwhelm an even well-designed infrastructure.
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QCon London 2026: Ethical AI is an Engineering Problem
At QCon London 2026, Clara Higuera, responsible AI program lead at BBVA, presented how many of the risks associated with AI systems are fundamentally engineering challenges rather than purely governance or policy issues.
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QCon London 2026: Running AI at the Edge - Running Real Workloads Directly in the Browser
At QCon London 2026, James Hall discussed running AI workloads directly in browsers, highlighting local processing benefits such as enhanced privacy, reduced latency and cost. He examined technologies like Transformers.js and WebGPU, illustrated practical applications, and provided guidelines for browser-based AI implementation, emphasizing appropriate use cases and evaluation principles.
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QCon London 2026: Fixing the AI Infra Scale Problem by Stuffing 1M Sandboxes in a Single Server
Unikraft CEO Felipe Huici demonstrated waking the one-millionth VM on a commodity server in ten milliseconds at QCon London. The talk traced a decade from academic unikernel research to a platform offering stateless scale-to-zero VMs with full isolation. Using Firecracker and VM snapshots, sleeping workloads resume instantly, turning server density from a hardware problem into a scheduling one.
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QCon London AI Coding State of the Game: More Capable, More Expensive, More Dangerous Coding Agents
In her QCon London keynote, Birgitta Böckeler, AI-Coding lead at Thoughtworks, reflected on the changes in the AI coding space over the past year. She emphasised a shift from vibe coding to using autonomous coding agents or swarms of agents. According to her, two major concerns in the field are the worsening security landscape and the rising costs of agent-based development.
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QCon London 2026: Introducing Tansu.io — Rethinking Kafka for Lean Operations
Peter Morgan introduced Tansu at QCon London, an open-source, Kafka-compatible, stateless, leaderless broker that scales to zero, with pluggable storage (S3, SQLite, Postgres), broker-side schema validation, and direct writes to Iceberg and Delta Lake. Written in Rust, it uses 20MB of RAM and starts in 10 milliseconds.
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QCon London 2026: Kleppmann on Mitigating Europe's Cloud Dependency with Local-First Software
Europe is completely dependent on US cloud services, Martin Kleppmann told QCon London. His fix: commoditise everything. He walked through three technologies he's helped build: multi-cloud via de facto standards, Bluesky's AT Protocol for social media, and local-first software for collaboration, all designed to make switching providers trivial and shift power back to users.
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QCon London 2026: Morgan Stanley Rethinks Its API Program for the MCP Era
Morgan Stanley engineers Jim Gough and Andreea Niculcea showed how they're retooling the bank's API program for AI agents using MCP and FINOS CALM. Live demos covered compliance guardrails, deployment gates, and zero-downtime rollouts across 100+ APIs. First API deployment shrank from two years to two weeks. They also demoed Google's A2A protocol running alongside MCP.
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QCon London 2026: Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet
Christine Lemmer-Webber, executive director at the Spritely Institute, and David Thompson, CTO at the Spritely Institute, presented “Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet” at QCon London 2026, where they discussed how Spritely works to decentralize the Internet with new foundational technologies that put users in control.
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QCon London 2026: Refreshing Stale Code Intelligence
At QCon London 2026, Jeff Smith discussed the growing mismatch between AI coding models and real-world software development. While AI tools are enabling developers to generate code faster than ever, Smith argued that the models themselves are increasingly “stale” because they lack the repository-specific knowledge required to produce production-ready contributions.
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QCon London 2026: Rewriting All of Spotify's Code Base, All the Time
At QCon London 2026, Spotify's Jo Kelly-Fenton and Aleksandar Mitic discussed Honk, an AI-powered coding agent that enables code migrations across Spotify's codebase. The system improves migration, reducing timelines drastically and addressing complexities that traditional scripts could not. Key challenges included handling edge cases and standardizing the codebase to facilitate review processes.
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QCon London 2026: SBOMs Move from Best Practice to Legal Obligation as CRA Enforcement Looms
In a talk at QCon London 2026, Viktor Petersson argued that software teams are running out of time to adopt SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials) due to pending legislative changes in both the US and Europe. He walked through the current regulatory landscape, spoke on the practical mechanics of generating high-quality SBOMs and on the emerging standards for distributing the resulting artefacts.
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QCon London 2026: Use<’lifetimes> For<’what>
At QCon London, TrueLayer engineer Ethan Brierley reframed Rust lifetimes using the Polonius borrow checker's mental model: lifetimes as sets of loans rather than regions of code. He built from borrow checker basics through variance and subtyping to higher-ranked lifetimes with serde, showing how the loans perspective makes previously confusing lifetime errors intuitive.