InfoQ - Transcripts - Presentations

Presentation: The Socio-Technical Staff+ Engineer: Architecture, Culture and Organisational Change

Vanessa Formicola — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Vanessa Formicola shares how technical leaders can move beyond "wishful architecture" by practicing holistic socio-technical engineering. She discusses why engineering leaders must account for organizational maturity, reward structures, geopolitical climate, and team dynamics, framing the staff-plus role as designing the conditions for technology to thrive rather than just picking tools.

By Vanessa Formicola

Presentation: Zero Trust Agent Systems that Pass Audits and Still Ship

Advait Patel — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Advait Patel shares a playbook for securing AI agent systems in production. He discusses moving defense boundaries from the prompt to the tool layer, enforcing scoped workload identities, and mitigating prompt injection via tool outputs. He explains how to structure audit-ready observability and implement kill switches to protect critical data while keeping deployment fast and compliant.

By Advait Patel

Presentation: Panel: Who Builds the Frontend Now? (And What Breaks When They Do)

Luca Mezzalira, James Hall, Danielle An, Ivan Zarea — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 11:00:00 GMT

The panelists explain how AI tools and vibe coding reshape frontend and mobile engineering. They share insights on evolving junior developer roles, managing AI-generated code review fatigue, designing systems for autonomous agents, enforcing architectural guardrails, and navigating economic shifts in open-source software sustainability.

By Luca Mezzalira, James Hall, Danielle An, Ivan Zarea

Presentation: Beyond the Harness: Canvas for AI Agents

Nimisha Asthagiri — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Nimisha Asthagiri shares how applying proven product engineering and architecture principles creates a bounded canvas for AI agents. She explains how this model provides agents with bounded autonomy, continuous drift detection, and decision records to scale software development resiliently.

By Nimisha Asthagiri

Presentation: The Ladder is Missing Rungs: Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

Alasdair Allan — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Alasdair Allan discusses empirical research from METR and Anthropic on AI coding adoption. He explains the "supervision paradox," where reliance on AI tools disrupts junior skill development, risks institutional context loss, and threatens the long-term engineering pipeline needed to oversee autonomous systems effectively.

By Alasdair Allan

Presentation: Wrangling Telemetry at Scale: a Guide to Self-Hosted Observability

Colin Douch — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Colin Douch shares battle-tested strategies for building and scaling self-hosted observability stacks. He explains how to effectively correlate metrics, structured logs, and distributed traces using open-source tooling like Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, and Jaeger, while navigating the engineering trade-offs of avoiding SaaS vendor lock-in.

By Colin Douch

Presentation: Serving LLMs at Scale: the Hidden KV Cache Advantage

Khawaja Shams — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Khawaja Shams shares a distributed systems perspective on scaling LLM inference stacks efficiently. He discusses practical strategies for optimizing GPU utilization, managing KV cache memory cliffs, leveraging tiered storage, reducing tail latency, and implementing disaggregated prefill and decode architectures to improve overall fleet performance, cost economics, and availability.

By Khawaja Shams