InfoQ - Transcripts

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

Presentation: Write-Ahead Intent Log: a Foundation for Efficient CDC at Scale

Vinay Chella, Akshat Goel — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:13:00 GMT

Vinay Chella and Akshat Goel discuss the challenges of running traditional CDC across heterogeneous databases during peak order traffic. They explain how Debezium hit limits under high load and share how they built Write-Ahead Intent Log (WAIL) - a custom architecture that utilizes a dumb producer proxy and a smart consumer pattern to cleanly separate the intent from the state payload.

By Vinay Chella, Akshat Goel

Presentation: From Hype to Strong Foundations: What the Rise, Fall and Resurgence of Agents Can Teach Us about Outlasting the Cycle

Aditya Kumarakrishnan — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:04:00 GMT

Aditya Kumarakrishnan explains how to move past the "amnesia phase" of AI. He shares a blueprint for engineering leaders to build modular agent frameworks using CoALA, leverage decades of process science for scalable workflows, and "terraform" legacy environments into robust, event-sourced artifacts capable of handling unpredictable, cross-functional agent demands.

By Aditya Kumarakrishnan

Presentation: Automating the Web with MCP: Infra that Doesn’t Break

Paul Klein — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:13:00 GMT

Paul Klein discusses the distributed systems challenges of scaling cloud-hosted browser infra for AI agents. He explains how to manage bursty, stateful multi-tenancy and secure Chromium environments against remote code execution using Firecracker. He also shares how to leverage the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to turn complex websites into accessible agentic tools.

By Paul Klein