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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

The Free-Lunch Guide to Idea Circularity

Holly Cummins discusses why "nothing is new under the sun" in tech. She maps historical architectural tradeoffs to modern cloud, microservices, and AI hype cycles. She connects financial debt (post-ZIRP) and technical debt to epistemic and sleep debt, showing engineering leaders how to navigate shifts in assumptions, embrace sustainability, and revive proven engineering disciplines.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Parting the Clouds: The Rise of Disaggregated Systems

Murat Demirbas discusses the shift toward disaggregated cloud database architectures driven by cloud economics. He explains how decoupling compute from storage enables elastic scaling, cost efficiency, and fault isolation. He shares how classical Paxos roles foreshadowed disaggregation, while analyzing network tradeoffs, shared-memory evolution, and self-assembling database designs.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Securing MCP in Production: Defense-in-Depth Beyond the Gateway

This article presents a defense-in-depth approach for securing Model Context Protocol (MCP) deployments in production. It outlines four architectural control layers: safe execution, management infrastructure, outbound trust, and semantic integrity, arguing that production security requires enforcement beyond the gateway at the earliest trustworthy control points.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Getting Rid of LeetCode Interviews in the World of AI

Daniel Doubrovkine explains why traditional LeetCode whiteboard interviews fail to evaluate senior engineering talent. He discusses his own experience bombing basic algorithm tests despite decades of leadership, and shares actionable frameworks for redefining the interview loop. Discover how evaluating human judgment, system design, and hands-on AI collaboration yields far better hiring signals.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

Platform Engineering for Everyone - Success Can’t Be Coded

Max Korbacher explains why successful internal development platforms cannot be built on tech alone. He discusses the pitfalls of infrastructure-first thinking, the importance of a clear product mindset, and how to measure real value using DevEx and SPACE metrics. Learn how to align your team, manage tech debt, and foster a thriving community to ensure lasting platform adoption.

All in devops

Events

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AI Security & Privacy Engineering Certification

Secure and govern production AI systems, from sensitive data to guardrails, evals, and audits.
Online. Register now.

Architect Certification

Distributed systems, decentralized decisions, platform engineering, and AI architecture.
Online. Register Now.

Engineering Leadership Certification

Work through leadership decisions with senior peers facing similar technical trade-offs.
Online. Register Now.

QCon San Francisco

What's working across AI, architecture, and leadership, from the teams doing it.
Register. Early bird ends August 11.

QCon AI New York

Production AI across agents, context, evals, security, and infrastructure, from the senior engineers building it.
Registration open.

QCon London

What early-adopter teams have proven in production, across 15 engineering tracks.
Register. Early bird ends August 11.

InfoQ Homepage Interviews Rich Hickey on Clojure's Features and Implementation

Rich Hickey on Clojure's Features and Implementation

42:40

Bio

Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure, is an independent software designer, consultant and application architect with over 20 years of experience in all facets of software development.

About the conference

QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community. QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

May 25, 2009

Interview with

Rich Hickey

by

Werner Schuster

BT