InfoQ - QCon Software Development Conference

How Code in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Becomes Write-Only and Disposable

Ben Linders — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:25:00 GMT

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes all code write-only,. It’s too dense to read, and tests define the behaviour and become the documentation. Code is also disposable; it becomes easier to rewrite than to debug. Humans can't review AI-generated code at scale. Intent decouples from implementation; developers should focus on creativity.

By Ben Linders

Presentation: Understanding Progressive Collapse: How To Avoid A Cascading Failure

Sam Newman — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Sam Newman discusses the concept of progressive collapse in civil engineering and how it applies to distributed systems. Using real-world examples - from the 1968 Ronan Point tower failure to AWS outages - he shares crucial resilience engineering strategies for software leaders. Learn how to strengthen components, isolate failures, and reduce interconnections to prevent catastrophic cascades.

By Sam Newman

Presentation: From Fab To Token - The State Of The Market

Jordan Nanos — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Jordan Nanos discusses how semiconductor constraints, data center expansion, and networking bottlenecks impact AI software architecture. Drawing from SemiAnalysis research, he shares insights on benchmark performance, GPU scaling, and tokenomics from chip fab to model inference.

By Jordan Nanos

Presentation: Turning Outward: Growing From Code to Influence

Brad Grantham — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:31:00 GMT

Brad Grantham discusses how software engineers and architects can transition from individual contributors to influential technical leaders. Brad shares actionable insights on expanding skills into business and legal domains, adapting communication styles for non-technical stakeholders, moving past ego to empower teams, and navigating complex organizational dynamics to maximize engineering impact.

By Brad Grantham

Presentation: From Thousands to One: Building LLM-Powered Selection Systems

Jendrik Jördening — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:06:00 GMT

Jendrik Jördening shares practical engineering strategies for integrating LLMs into production pipelines. He discusses overcoming non-determinism, restricting schemas, separating semantic text extraction from deterministic code, and validating choices using discriminator models. Learn how to structure LLMs with an MVC approach to ensure database integrity, observability, and system reliability.

By Jendrik Jördening

Presentation: From Models to Agents: Building Context-Aware Consumer AI at Scale at DoorDash

Sudeep Das — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Sudeep Das shares how DoorDash shifts from legacy one-shot predictions to an agentic recommendation platform. He discusses leveraging language-native consumer memory, RQ-VAE semantic IDs for catalog representation, and grounded search to dramatically boost relevance and conversion metrics.

By Sudeep Das

Presentation: The Right 300 Tokens Beat 100k Noisy Ones: The Architecture of Context Engineering

Patrick Debois, Baruch Sadogursky — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Baruch Sadogursky and Patrick Debois discuss why coding agents fail due to bloated context windows and stuffed prompts. They explain practical context engineering fixes, including lazy-loaded skills, versioned context artifacts, externalized memory banks, and LLM-as-a-judge evals. Software architects & engineering leaders will learn how to turn raw markdown files into reliable agentic workflows.

By Patrick Debois, Baruch Sadogursky

How Artificial Intelligence Disrupts Engineering Progression

Ben Linders — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:28:00 GMT

AI is disrupting career progression by eliminating the learning opportunities at each rung while simultaneously enabling people to perform above their experience level, Alasdair Allan explained in his talk Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle at QCon London. Fewer junior developers join the industry, and AI slows hiring at the entry level.

By Ben Linders

Presentation: Migrating Uber Eats Feeds to Webview

Nick DiStefano — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:26:00 GMT

Nick DiStefano shares how Uber Eats migrated from traditional native app screens to a native-driven, single-page WebView architecture. He explains key strategies for engineering leaders and software architects looking to bypass native release cycles, manage cross-platform state, build generic native-web message bridges, and execute large-scale UI migrations without degrading metrics.

By Nick DiStefano

Presentation: Adopting Memory-Safety and Fine-Grained Compartmentalisation with CHERI

David Chisnall — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

David Chisnall discusses how the CHERI hardware architecture redefines pointer safety to solve isolation and sharing challenges. He explains how CHERI enables spatial and temporal memory safety for C/C++, scales down to microcontrollers with CHERIoT, and replaces costly OS-level RPC mechanisms with lightweight, auditable compartmentalization - all without requiring massive codebase rewrites.

By David Chisnall

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

Presentation: Leveraging Adversary Emulation for GenAI Red Teaming

Kennedy Torkura — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:32:00 GMT

Kennedy Torkura discusses practical GenAI red teaming techniques to safeguard LLMs and knowledge bases against security threats like data poisoning and LLMjacking on AWS. He explains how engineering leaders and architects can bridge traditional cloud security with MITRE ATLAS frameworks to proactively identify vulnerabilities, implement guardrails, and secure production AI applications.

By Kennedy Torkura