InfoQ - Transcripts - Presentations

Presentation: Maximizing Success with Limited Time, Resources, and Energy: Lessons from Startup Engineering

David Gudeman — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:04:00 GMT

David Gudeman discusses battle-tested architectural patterns for resource-constrained engineering teams. Drawing from over a decade of startup experience, he explains how pairing GCP, Firebase, and Cloud Run accelerates product-market fit. Learn how to eliminate redundant frontend state, structure event-driven backends, and maintain lean DevOps while building for long-term scalability.

By David Gudeman

Presentation: The Agent Harness: Control Planes, Invariants, and Approval Boundaries for Production AI Agents

Vinoth Govindarajan — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:00:00 GMT

OpenAI’s Vinoth Govindarajan discusses why production AI agents fail beyond model hallucination. Using real-world case studies like OpenClaw, he explains the key principles of reliable agent harnesses: establishing explicit state ownership, serializing concurrent state mutations, scoping execution authority, and validating actions at the user-visible edge.

By Vinoth Govindarajan

Presentation: Context Engineering at LinkedIn: How We Built an Organizational Context Layer for AI Agents with MCP

Ajay Prakash — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Ajay Prakash discusses how LinkedIn overcomes AI agent limitations in large codebases. He explains Contextual Agent Playbooks and Tools - built on Model Context Protocol (MCP) - which serves procedural memory, code search, and runbooks directly to coding agents. Prakash shares architectural details and operational guardrails that deliver a 20% productivity boost with zero loss in reliability.

By Ajay Prakash

Presentation: Complexity and Creativity in Software Engineering

Phillip Mortimer — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Phillip Mortimer discusses the shift toward write-only software driven by AI code generation. He explains why traditional pull requests are broken and shares how engineering leaders can manage complexity by decoupling intent from implementation, automating code reviews, and building self-healing architecture to unleash developer creativity across senior engineering and architecture teams.

By Phillip Mortimer

Presentation: When Incidents Refuse to End

Vanessa Huerta Granda — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:30:00 GMT

Vanessa Huerta Granda explains how marathon incidents expose the gap between work as imagined and work as done. Drawing from real-world scenarios, she shares how complex outages reveal organizational fragility, human limits, and system interdependencies—and why incident response requires structured endurance, humane rotations, and holistic cross-functional coordination.

By Vanessa Huerta Granda

Presentation: Teaching Engineers, Trusting AI: How Education Enabled Autonomous Code Review

Sarah Deitke — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Sarah Deitke discusses how Duolingo drives cultural AI adoption beyond tooling access. She explains their internal AI literacy workshops and observability dashboards, then shares a case study on redesigning code review using an automated PR risk-assessment bot. Deitke demonstrates how pairing targeted developer education with safe AI guardrails speeds up delivery without increasing defect rates.

By Sarah Deitke

Presentation: Lead without a Ladder: How I Climbed into Engineering Leadership

Pauline Jepp — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 09:10:00 GMT

Pauline Jepp explains how systems thinking, rock climbing, and flocking behaviors apply to engineering leadership. She shares strategies for balancing team autonomy with alignment, supporting invisible work like mentorship, and navigating transitions from hands-on engineer to engineering leader while maintaining organizational trust and psychological safety.

By Pauline Jepp

Presentation: Decision Models in Agentic Architectures: from Production to Agent Skills

Alex Porcelli — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Alex Porcelli discusses the critical gap in enterprise AI: non-deterministic output and lack of accountability in high-stakes decisions. He shares how integrating DMN decision models with LLMs, agent skills, and NeMo guardrails creates auditable, deterministic agentic architectures - allowing business leaders to own decision logic while engineers maintain robust architectural governance.

By Alex Porcelli

Presentation: From Retrieval to Reasoning: Building Production-Ready Agentic AI Systems with Knowledge Graphs

Cassie Shum — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Cassie Shum discusses why knowledge graphs serve as a critical foundation for agentic systems. Moving beyond basic RAG, she explains 4 practical architectural patterns: context bundling, decision provenance, code as truth, and agent visibility. She demonstrates an engineering harness built on a knowledge graph to streamline feedback loops, optimize token usage, and maintain system reliability.

By Cassie Shum