InfoQ - Conferences - Presentations

Presentation: Enhancing Reliability Using Service-Level Prioritized Load Shedding at Netflix

Anirudh Mendiratta, Benjamin Fedorka — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:20:00 GMT

The speakers discuss Netflix’s architecture for surviving extreme traffic spikes. They explain the mechanics of prioritized load shedding embedded in their Envoy sidecar proxy, allowing user-initiated requests to steal capacity from non-critical traffic. They share automated platform strategies for continuous chaos load testing, config generation, and retry storm mitigation.

By Anirudh Mendiratta, Benjamin Fedorka

Presentation: Graph RAG: Building Smarter Retrieval Workflows with Knowledge Graphs

Cassie Shum — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:01:00 GMT

Cassie Shum discusses the architectural evolution of GraphRAG and why data foundations are critical for advanced AI workflows. She explains how traditional vector RAG falls short when addressing global context, multi-hop reasoning, and provenance. She shares enterprise strategies for building semantically structured knowledge graphs that shift raw orchestrating logic down to the data layer.

By Cassie Shum

Presentation: The Infrastructure Challenge Behind Production AI

Simerus Mahesh, Alex Infanzon, Meryem Arik, Luca Bianchi, Renato Losio — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:00:00 GMT

The panelists explain the realities of running AI systems reliably at scale. While building models is solved, maintaining production databases under constant pressure is not. They discuss the emerging architectural decisions separating teams that scale gracefully from those facing catastrophic outages, and what engineering leaders must rethink today.

By Simerus Mahesh, Alex Infanzon, Meryem Arik, Luca Bianchi, Renato Losio

Presentation: Trustworthy Productivity: Securing AI-Accelerated Development

Sriram Madapusi Vasudevan — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:35:00 GMT

Sriram Madapusi Vasudevan discusses industry-converging patterns for securing autonomous AI agents in production. He explains the critical vulnerabilities hidden inside the ReAct loop across context, reasoning, and tool execution. He shares how to mitigate risks like memory poisoning and rogue tool execution using defense-in-depth strategies, LLM-as-a-judge critics, and MAESTRO threat modeling.

By Sriram Madapusi Vasudevan

Presentation: Million PDFs: Building a Modern Document Infrastructure with Rust and Typst

Erik Steiger — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:35:00 GMT

Erik Steiger discusses the operational pain of legacy PDF generation in regulated banking and manufacturing. He explains how transitioning from resource-heavy engines like Puppeteer and LaTeX to a serverless Rust architecture powered by Typst can drop render latencies below 2ms. He shares how applying Git and Docker concepts to template registries ensures ironclad compliance and rapid debugging.

By Erik Steiger

Presentation: AI Works, Pull Requests Don’t: How AI is Breaking the SDLC and What to Do about it

Michael Webster — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:17:00 GMT

Michael Webster discusses the rise of headless AI agents and their impact on software delivery pipelines. He shares how massive, AI-generated pull requests create a severe bottleneck for human reviewers and introduce persistent technical debt. Learn how engineering leaders can leverage test impact analysis and automated validation pipelines to verify agentic output without sacrificing stability.

By Michael Webster

Presentation: Rust at the Core - Accelerating Polyglot SDK Development

Spencer Judge — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:23:00 GMT

Spencer Judge discusses the architectural pattern of building a shared core in Rust with language-specific layers on top. Drawing from his work on Temporal's SDKs, he shares lessons on navigating FFI boundaries, bridging async concepts, and managing memory safely. He explains the limitations of native extensions and how emerging tech like WebAssembly can streamline cross-language architecture.

By Spencer Judge

Presentation: Rules for Understanding Language Models

Naomi Saphra — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:25:00 GMT

Naomi Saphra discusses 5 rules governing language model behavior, breaking down why LLMs act like populations rather than individuals. She explains how tokenization creates strange semantic blind spots and highlights the mechanics of sycophancy, showing how models leverage subtle data associations to match user biases and demographics - even guessing political views based on favorite sports teams.

By Naomi Saphra

Presentation: The Time it Wasn't DNS

Sean Klein — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:05:00 GMT

Sean Klein discusses why "human error" is a dangerous myth in complex systems. Sharing the inside story of Azure’s 2023 global WAN outage, he explains how modern incident analysis looks past the "Five Whys" to uncover systemic issues. Learn how engineering leaders can move away from blame, improve Standard Operating Procedures, and design resilient systems that actively protect their engineers.

By Sean Klein

Presentation: Challenging Google Analytics: Building a Scalable, Cost-Effective User Tracking Service

Alina Krasavina — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:07:00 GMT

Alina Krasavina explains how Delivery Hero successfully deprecated Google Analytics and migrated to an internal user tracking platform. She discusses how a simplistic, highly scalable architecture allowed them to handle 10 times more load while capturing 97% of tracking data.

By Alina Krasavina