InfoQ - QCon London 2026 - Presentations

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

Presentation: Automatically Retrofitting JIT Compilers

Laurence Tratt — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Laurence Tratt discusses yk, an open-source meta-tracing JIT compiler framework. He shares how to automatically speed up C-based language interpreters like Lua and MicroPython with minimal, non-invasive code changes. He explains the inner workings of tracing loops, optimizing compiled traces using developer hints, and managing complex deoptimization back to the interpreter.

By Laurence Tratt

Presentation: The Free-Lunch Guide to Idea Circularity

Holly Cummins — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Holly Cummins discusses why "nothing is new under the sun" in tech. She maps historical architectural tradeoffs to modern cloud, microservices, and AI hype cycles. She connects financial debt (post-ZIRP) and technical debt to epistemic and sleep debt, showing engineering leaders how to navigate shifts in assumptions, embrace sustainability, and revive proven engineering disciplines.

By Holly Cummins