InfoQ - Culture & Methods

Podcast: Tiger Teams, Evals and Agents: The New AI Engineering Playbook

Sam Bhagwat — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:00:00 GMT

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Sam Bhagwat, co-founder and CEO of Mastra, about building and sustaining open source communities, the emerging discipline of AI engineering and evals, and how cross-functional Tiger Teams are key to shipping agentic applications.

By Sam Bhagwat

Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering

Ben Linders — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:10:00 GMT

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.

By Ben Linders

Presentation: Local First – How to Build Software Which Still Works after the Acquihire

Alex Good — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:37:00 GMT

Alex Good discusses the fragility of modern cloud-dependent apps and shares a roadmap for "local-first" software. By leveraging a Git-like DAG structure and Automerge, he explains how to move from brittle client-server models to resilient systems where data lives on-device. He explores technical implementation, rich-text merging, and how this infrastructure simplifies engineering workflows.

By Alex Good

Inside Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped Archive: AI Narratives at Scale and the Privacy Trade‑Off

Matt Foster — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Spotify's engineering team developed the 2025 "Wrapped Archive," generating 1.4 billion personalized reports for 350 million users. This system identifies key listening days and crafts narratives using a language model. As companies increasingly provide narrative recaps, concerns about user privacy and data tracking persist, necessitating a balance between insights and privacy safeguards.

By Matt Foster

Article: A Better Alternative to Reducing CI Regression Test Suite Sizes

James Bornefelt Westfall — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

How can you focus in a sea of results from a large regression test suite? This article describes a stochastic approach that relies on some degree of redundancy in your CI regression test set. This approach does not guarantee you will catch every bug every time, but it gives you your best bet of not missing the subtle signatures of all the bugs uncovered by your CI regression test suite runs.

By James Bornefelt Westfall