InfoQ - QCon Software Development Conference - Presentations

Presentation: Theme Systems at Scale: How To Build Highly Customizable Software

Guilherme Carreiro — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:30:00 GMT

Shopify Staff Engineer Guilherme Carreiro discusses building and scaling highly customizable platforms. Using Shopify’s Liquid theme system as a case study, he explains how to balance extreme design flexibility with low-latency performance under massive traffic. He shares insights on implementing secure domain-specific languages, native code extensions, and resilient developer tooling.

By Guilherme Carreiro

Presentation: Building Evals for AI Adoption: from Principles to Practice

Mallika Rao — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Mallika Rao discusses the hidden risk of evaluation debt in production AI systems, drawing on her experience at Twitter, Walmart, and Netflix. She explains why traditional metrics fail modern architectures, breaks down a five-layer evaluation stack spanning infrastructure and UX, and shares a diagnostic maturity model to help engineering leaders eliminate silent semantic failures.

By Mallika Rao

Presentation: From Founding Engineer to CTO to CEO – at the Same Startup

Trisha Ballakur — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:33:00 GMT

Trisha Ballakur discusses her journey from a backend software engineer to CTO and CEO, using her startup Pointz as a case study. She explains how to implement bottom-up customer discovery to find product-market fit, effectively delegate to global contractors to reduce build times, customize open-source repos like Valhalla, and apply engineering test-case models to business development.

By Trisha Ballakur

Presentation: Designing AI Platforms for Reliability: Tools for Certainty, Agents for Discovery

Aaron Erickson — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:04:00 GMT

Aaron Erickson discusses the evolution of AI workflows, shifting from "vibe checking" to building reliable, multi-agent frameworks. He explains how to combine deterministic software guardrails with agentic discovery, optimize agent hierarchies, leverage time-series foundation models, and implement rigorous evaluation pyramids to ensure architecture scales effectively in production.

By Aaron Erickson

Presentation: Realtime and Batch Processing of GPU Workloads

Joseph Stein — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:08:00 GMT

Joseph Stein discusses engineering an enterprise AI-as-a-Service platform within a private cloud data center. He explains how to maximize underutilized GPU pools via multi-namespace scheduling, leverage Valkey and Lua for atomic priority queuing and backpressure management, mitigate OWASP Top 10 LLM risks via central proxy gateways, and scale batch pipelines using a custom S3-to-Kafka proxy.

By Joseph Stein

Presentation: From Legacy to Sovereignty: Driving the Future of Insurance through Platform Engineering

Sergiu Petean — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:35:00 GMT

Sergiu Petean discusses the strategic journey of evolving DevOps into platform engineering within heavily regulated enterprise environments. He explains how to maximize efficiency using dynamic reference architectures, align platform KPIs directly with board-level business goals, reduce cognitive load via custom team topologies, and maintain innovation sovereignty through open-source technology.

By Sergiu Petean

Presentation: AI Native Engineering

Ian Thomas — Fri, 22 May 2026 09:18:00 GMT

Ian Thomas shares a case study on embracing AI-native engineering within Meta’s Reality Labs. He explains the "Assess and Grow" framework, a maturity model designed to move teams from manual toil to AI-integrated innovation. He discusses real-world wins - including hitting 90% code coverage in record time - while addressing senior concerns like "code slop," review fatigue, and maintaining quality.

By Ian Thomas