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Topics

Development

Featured in Development

Expanding Swift from Apps to Services

Cory Benfield discusses the evolution of Swift from an app language to a critical tool for secure, high-scale services. He explains how Swift’s lack of a garbage collector eliminates tail latency and shares how its "zero-cost abstractions" rival C performance. He shares Apple’s roadmap for incremental adoption and demonstrates groundbreaking new interoperability for C++ and Java ecosystems.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Engineering Speed at Scale — Architectural Lessons from Sub-100-ms APIs

Sub‑100-ms APIs emerge from disciplined architecture using latency budgets, minimized hops, async fan‑out, layered caching, circuit breakers, and strong observability. But long‑term speed depends on culture, with teams owning p99, monitoring drift, managing thread pools, and treating performance as a shared, continuous responsibility.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Beyond the Warehouse: Why BigQuery Alone Won’t Solve Your Data Problems

Sarah Usher discusses the architectural "breaking point" where warehouses like BigQuery struggle with latency and cost. She explains the necessity of a conceptual data lifecycle (Raw, Curated, Use Case) to regain control over lineage and innovation. She shares practical strategies to design a single source of truth that empowers both ML teams and analytics without bottlenecking scale.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Scaling to 100+ as a Director: Lessons From Growing Engineering Organizations

Thiago Ghisi discusses the strategic evolution required to lead 100+ engineers without breaking the organization. He explains his "Three Levels of Impact" framework and shares practical lessons on speeding up decision-making, cultivating leadership teams, and building organizational resilience. Learn why he views reorgs as a continuous deployment feature rather than a one-time traumatic event.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

From Alert Fatigue to Agent-Assisted Intelligent Observability

As systems grow, observability becomes harder to maintain and incidents harder to diagnose. Agentic observability layers AI on existing tools, starting in read-only mode to detect anomalies and summarize issues. Over time, agents add context, correlate signals, and automate low-risk tasks. This approach frees engineers to focus on analysis and judgment.

All in devops

Events

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InfoQ Architect Certification

Join Luca Mezzalira for this 5-week online cohort. Master socio-technical architecture leadership.

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QCon London 2026

Learn what works in AI, architecture, data, security & FinTech.

Early Bird ends Feb 10.

Learn how leading engineering teams run AI in production—reliably, securely, and at scale.

Early Bird ends Feb 10.

QCon San Francisco

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InfoQ Homepage Interviews Caitie McCaffrey on Scaling Halo 4 Services, the Orleans Actor Framework, Distributed Programming

Caitie McCaffrey on Scaling Halo 4 Services, the Orleans Actor Framework, Distributed Programming

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22:55

Bio

Caitie McCaffrey is a Backend Brat and Distributed Systems Diva at Twitter. Before that she spent most of her career building services and systems that power the entertainment industry at 343 Industries, MS Game Studios, and HBO. She has a degree in CS from Cornell University, and has worked on several games incl. Gears of War 2 & 3, and Halo 4. She blogs at CaitieM.com and tweets @Caitie .

About the conference

Software is Changing the World. QCon empowers software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the developer community. A practitioner-driven conference, QCon is designed for technical team leads, architects, engineering directors, and project managers who influence innovation in their teams.

Apr 24, 2015

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