InfoQ Homepage QCon Software Development Conference Content on InfoQ
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How Code in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Becomes Write-Only and Disposable
Artificial intelligence (AI) makes all code write-only,. It’s too dense to read, and tests define the behaviour and become the documentation. Code is also disposable; it becomes easier to rewrite than to debug. Humans can't review AI-generated code at scale. Intent decouples from implementation; developers should focus on creativity.
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How Artificial Intelligence Disrupts Engineering Progression
AI is disrupting career progression by eliminating the learning opportunities at each rung while simultaneously enabling people to perform above their experience level, Alasdair Allan explained in his talk Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle at QCon London. Fewer junior developers join the industry, and AI slows hiring at the entry level.
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AI-Assisted Software Development: Team Profiles and Capabilities for Putting Research into Action
AI is an amplifier; strategic focus on the organizational system brings the greatest returns. DORA's 2025 research on AI in software development provides team profiles and success capabilities that can be used to put the research into practice.
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QCon AI New York 2026: Registration Opens for December 15-16 Production-AI Conference
QCon AI New York 2026 (Dec 15-16) has opened registration at The Westin Jersey City Newport. Six tracks on production AI, chaired by Eder Ignatowicz with Faye Zhang and Wes Reisz. First sessions announced in August, full program by November.
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QCon AI Boston: Production AI Moves beyond Prompts to Platforms, Harnesses, and Evals
QCon AI Boston 2026 focused on the operational challenges of deploying AI agents, emphasizing the need for robust production infrastructure. Key themes included improving context management, ensuring security through a "harness" around agents, and adopting a comprehensive engineering model for AI.
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How a Culture of Data-Driven Conversations Can Support Platform Engineering
To provide SRE as a service, a team built a center of excellence, introducing Federated SREs and roles like production manager and technical tribe lead. They created a culture of data-driven conversations where SLOs and SLAs were democratised. Surviving growing cognitive load meant continuously simplifying architecture and embedding sovereignty and resilience into platform design decisions.
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QCon San Francisco 2026: 12 Tracks Announced
The 12 tracks for QCon San Francisco 2026 (November 16-20) are now live. Four tracks cover AI in production. The other eight cover the rest of what senior engineering still demands: distributed systems, architecture teardowns, resilience, platform internals, API design, and Staff+ leadership. Early bird pricing runs until May 12th.
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Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering
Work isn’t the only place where you can develop valuable leadership skills, Sophie Weston mentioned in the video The Principal Engineer’s Path from her QCon London talk. She suggested thinking about the things you do outside of your job where you can learn and practice useful leadership skills, and bringing your full skill set - your whole self - to work.
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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: 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: Blurring the Lines: Engineering & Data Teams in the Age of AI
At QCon London 2026, Lada Indra, head of data platform at Pleo, shared insights from his experience across high-scale data systems. He illustrated both the risks of poorly aligned teams and the practical strategies that organizations can adopt to bridge the gap.
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QCon London 2026: Reliable Retrieval for Production AI Systems
At QCon London 2026, Lan Chu, AI tech lead at Rabobank, shared lessons from deploying a production AI search system used internally by more than 300 users across 10,000 documents. Her experience shows that most failures in RAG systems stem from indexing and retrieval, rather than the language model itself.
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QCon London 2026: the Hidden Power of Boring Problems
At QCon London 2026, Yinka Omole, lead software engineer at Personio, presented a session exploring a recurring dilemma engineers face: whether to spend time mastering the newest technologies and frameworks, or to invest in deeper, foundational problems that may appear less exciting but deliver long-term value.
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Advance Your Socio-Technical Architecture Skills with InfoQ’s New Online Cohorts
Enhance your architectural leadership with InfoQ’s new online cohorts starting April 15, May 7, and June 10, 2026. Led by Luca Mezzalira, this 5-week program focuses on socio-technical skills like ADRs, platform engineering, and AI trade-offs. Senior practitioners can apply frameworks to live projects, earn ICSAET certification, and contribute to the InfoQ community.
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Making Retrospectives Effective with Small Concrete Actions and Rotating Facilitators
Teams can run regular retrospectives that focus on 1–2 concrete weekly actions to avoid complaint circles, Natan Žabkar Nordberg mentioned at QCon London. You can rotate facilitators to build ownership, with each one bringing their own unique perspective. He suggested framing bigger changes as 4–6 week experiments, then vote to keep, tweak, or revert, ensuring learning and continuous improvement.