InfoQ

Uber Improves Restaurant Recommendations Using Real-Time Signals and Listwise Ranking

Leela Kumili — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:32:00 GMT

Uber updates its Uber Eats Home Feed recommendation system using near real-time user sequence features and a Generative Recommender model. The system evolves from hand-crafted features to transformer-based sequence modeling, reduces feature freshness from 24 hours to seconds, and shifts from pointwise scoring to listwise GenRec for improved contextual ranking and real-time personalization.

By Leela Kumili

InfoQ Launches Online AI Engineering Cohort and Certification for Senior Software Practitioners

Artenisa Chatziou — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

InfoQ has launched a five-week online AI Engineering certification for senior practitioners working on production AI systems, covering RAG, agents, AI platforms, evals, reliability, and operational trade-offs.

By Artenisa Chatziou

Discord Rebuilds Database Operations Around Automation to Manage ScyllaDB at Massive Scale

Craig Risi — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Discord has detailed how it rebuilt its database operations around a new internal orchestration framework called the Scylla Control Plane (SCP), enabling its small infrastructure team to automate large-scale ScyllaDB cluster management tasks that previously took days of manual work.

By Craig Risi

xAI Releases Grok Skills and Updates Tool Calling Responses API

Daniel Dominguez — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:24:00 GMT

xAI has released Grok Skills together with enhancements to the Responses API for Grok 4.3, enabling persistent custom expertise that the model retains across all conversations.

By Daniel Dominguez

Cloudflare Completes Its Agent Infrastructure Stack with Browser Run Rebuild and Six-Layer Platform

Steef-Jan Wiggers — Fri, 22 May 2026 09:21:00 GMT

Cloudflare rebuilt Browser Run on its own Containers platform, delivering 4x higher concurrency and 50% faster response times. The upgrade completes a six-layer agent infrastructure stack: compute (Dynamic Workers + Sandboxes), orchestration (Dynamic Workflows), memory (Agent Memory), browsing (Browser Run), and commerce (Stripe Projects).

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Presentation: AI Native Engineering

Ian Thomas — Fri, 22 May 2026 09:18:00 GMT

Ian Thomas shares a case study on embracing AI-native engineering within Meta’s Reality Labs. He explains the "Assess and Grow" framework, a maturity model designed to move teams from manual toil to AI-integrated innovation. He discusses real-world wins - including hitting 90% code coverage in record time - while addressing senior concerns like "code slop," review fatigue, and maintaining quality.

By Ian Thomas

Bintrail: MySQL Time-Travel Queries Using Indexed Binlogs

Renato Losio — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:03:00 GMT

Bintrail is a recently introduced layer that brings point-in-time queries and row-history lookups to MySQL, the only major relational database lacking native temporal querying. Using indexed binlogs behind ProxySQL and without modifying MySQL or application code, Bintrail supports querying data as of a past timestamp and reviewing change history, primarily for recovery and audit scenarios.

By Renato Losio

Six Sessions at QCon AI Boston 2026 That Take Productionizing AI Seriously

Artenisa Chatziou — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:15:00 GMT

QCon AI Boston 2026 is close to selling out. Six sessions where speakers engage directly with the gap between AI working in a demo and AI working in production.

By Artenisa Chatziou

Presentation: The Ironies of A^2 I^2

J. Paul Reed — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:55:00 GMT

J. Paul Reed discusses the "ironies of automation" - a 40 years-old concept now amplified by AI. He explains how advanced systems often make the human operator more crucial, not less, while simultaneously degrading the skills needed to intervene. Sharing real-world stories of "AI-fueled" incidents, he shares why over-reliance on AI can double recovery times and how to maintain resilience.

By J. Paul Reed

How Platform Engineering Using Golden Bricks Can Enable Fast and Smooth Delivery

Ben Linders — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:35:00 GMT

Platform engineering should have a product focus, as developers are customers; they must provide composable, self-service capabilities, golden bricks rather than rigid golden paths, so teams can move quickly while maintaining consistency. Success is measured through adoption, developer experience, and business outcomes such as deployment frequency and change failure rate.

By Ben Linders

With Android CLI, Google is Making the Android Toolchain Agent-Friendly

Sergio De Simone — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Google introduced new Android development tools that enable building apps up to 3x faster by using AI agents, including a redesigned Android command-line interface (CLI), structured skills", and an integrated knowledge base. These tools are designed to support agent-driven workflows and are compatible with third-party agents such as Claude Code and Codex, in addition to Google Gemini.

By Sergio De Simone

OpenTofu 1.12: The Feature Terraform Never Shipped

Claudio Masolo — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The OpenTofu community released version 1.12.0 on May 14, 2026. This update isn’t a complete rewrite, but it does resolve some issues that infrastructure teams have faced for a while.

By Claudio Masolo

Article: The Mathematics of Backlogs: Capacity Planning for Queue Recovery

Rajesh Kumar Pandey — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

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.

By Rajesh Kumar Pandey

Designing a Multi-Agent System for Engineering Support at Scale: a Case Study from Grab

Leela Kumili — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:38:00 GMT

Grab’s Central Data Team built a multi-agent AI system to automate repetitive engineering support tasks across its data warehouse platform. The system separates investigation and enhancement workflows using specialized agents coordinated via an orchestration layer. It reduces operational load, improves resolution speed, and shifts engineering effort from firefighting to platform engineering work.

By Leela Kumili

Presentation: The AI Gateway: Scaling Centralized Inference Across Decentralized Teams

Meryem Arik — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:40:00 GMT

Meryem Arik discusses why modern engineering teams face "inference chaos" and how AI model gateways provide a critical control layer. She explains the balance between empowering decentralized teams to choose the best models and maintaining centralized oversight for security, RBAC, and cost control. Explore open-source solutions like LiteLLM and Doubleword to streamline your AI infra.

By Meryem Arik