InfoQ - Agile

Podcast: Founders, Friction, and Focus: Building Engineering Teams at Early-Stage Startups

David Gudeman — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to David Gudeman about the unique culture of early-stage startup engineering, how founder personality quirks and premature process impositions can derail teams, and how engineers can build influence and make deliberate career choices without formal power.

By David Gudeman

Podcast: Cloud and DevOps InfoQ Trends Report 2026: AI, Resilience, Platforms, FinOps, and Sovereignty

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

In this episode of the podcast, members of the InfoQ editorial staff and friends of InfoQ will discuss current trends in the cloud and DevOps domains as part of our annual trends report. These reports provide InfoQ readers with a high-level overview of key topics to watch. This podcast offers a chance to hear our raw conversation and the stories shared by our expert practitioners.

By Daniel Bryant, Matt Saunders, Shweta Vohra, Steef-Jan Wiggers, Mark Silvester, Renato Losio

Presentation: Producing the World's Cheapest Tokens: A How-to Guide

Meryem Arik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:05:00 GMT

Meryem Arik discusses strategies for designing low-cost LLM inference architectures for high-volume, non-real-time workloads. She explains how software architects and engineering leaders can achieve order-of-magnitude cost reductions by making critical trade-offs across hardware, inference runtimes, speculative decoding, and smart queue reordering.

By Meryem Arik

Article: Comprehension as an Architectural Characteristic: A System That Is Not Understood Cannot Evolve Safely

Jacobus Meintjes, Narayana Rengaswamy, Paul Katsande, Sureshbabu Bikki — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

As AI commoditizes code output, system comprehension silently decays, creating cognitive debt that threatens safe architectural evolution. This article explores why human understanding must be treated as an essential architectural characteristic, offering actionable strategies, socio-technical metrics, and design checkpoints to preserve intent across modern engineering teams.

By Jacobus Meintjes, Narayana Rengaswamy, Paul Katsande, Sureshbabu Bikki

Presentation: Rewriting All of Spotify's Code Base, All the Time

Jo Kelly-Fenton, Aleksandar Mitic — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Jo Kelly-Fenton and Aleksandar Mitic explain how Spotify created "Honk," an AI coding agent, to handle complex fleet-wide codebase migrations. They share key architectural insights on decoupling CI verification runtimes from AI agents, dealing with automated pull request bottlenecks, and driving aggressive standardization across thousands of engineering repositories.

By Jo Kelly-Fenton, Aleksandar Mitic

Article: InfoQ Culture and Methods Trends Report - 2026

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

This report summarizes how the InfoQ Culture and Methods editorial team sees the ongoing and emergent trends in the culture and methods space in 2026.

By Shane Hastie, Ben Linders, Vanessa Formicola, Shawna Martell, Rafiq Gemmail, Craig Smith, Phillip Mortimer, Yinka Omole

Podcast: Culture & Methods Trends 2026: The Human Side of AI Engineering

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

This is the Engineering Culture Trends Report for 2026. Featuring a panel of QCon speakers and InfoQ contributors, they discussed AI adoption maturity and risk, the transformation of engineering team structures and roles, and the human dimensions of software development that must not be lost in 2026.

By Ben Linders, Rafiq Gemmail, Craig Smith, Vanessa Formicola, Shawna Martell, Phillip Mortimer, Yinka Omole

Presentation: From ms to µs: OSS Valkey Architecture Patterns for Modern AI

Dumanshu Goyal — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:34:00 GMT

Dumanshu Goyal discusses optimizing data layers for low-latency workloads like AI feature stores. Drawing lessons from NASA's Space Shuttle, he explains how proxy architectures introduce hidden CPU costs, elevated tail latencies, and blast-radius risks. He demonstrates how direct-access Valkey architectures achieve microsecond latency, improve resilience, and slash infrastructure costs.

By Dumanshu Goyal