BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Register Sign in

Unlock the full InfoQ experience

Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with content, and download exclusive resources.

Log In

or

Don't have an InfoQ account?

Stay updated on topics and peers that matter to youReceive instant alerts on the latest insights and trends.
Quickly access free resources for continuous learningMinibooks, videos with transcripts, and training materials.
Save articles and read at anytimeBookmark articles to read whenever youre ready.

Logo - Back to homepage

News Articles Presentations Podcasts Guides

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

[Video Podcast] Improving Valkey with Madelyn Olson

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Madelyn Olson, a maintainer of the Valkey project and a Principal Software Development Engineer at Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB. The conversation covers how Valkey started as an open source fork of Redis and how the maintainers optimized the memory usage and improved throughput.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Building LLMs in Resource-Constrained Environments: A Hands-On Perspective

In this article, the author argues that infrastructure and compute limitations can drive innovation. It demonstrates how smaller, efficient models, synthetic data generation, and disciplined engineering enable the creation of impactful LLM-based AI systems despite severe resource constraints.

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

Helpful links

Choose your language

InfoQ Architect Certification

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

Register Interest.

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

Learn what's next in AI and software, from teams already doing it.

Register now.

InfoQ Homepage Interviews Max Sklar on Machine Learning at Foursquare

Max Sklar on Machine Learning at Foursquare

Download

21:43

Bio

Max Sklar is an engineer and a machine learning specialist. At Foursquare, his objective is to constantly make the application smarter and more interesting for users. Before Foursquare, Max contributed to the emerging location-based social space with the creation of Stickymap. Max holds an M.S. in Information Systems from NYU, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale.

About the conference

Software is changing the world; QCon aims to empower software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the enterprise software development community; to achieve this, QCon is organized as a practitioner-driven conference designed for people influencing innovation in their teams: team leads, architects, project managers, engineering directors.

Aug 09, 2012

Interview with

Max Sklar

by

Barry Burd

BT