InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter

A monthly overview of things you need to know as an architect or aspiring architect.

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

News Articles Presentations Podcasts Guides

Development

Clojure's Journey: From Simplicity to Enterprise Maturity

Jordan Miller discusses the evolution of the Clojure ecosystem, from Rich Hickey's initial vision tackling complexity to its current status as a mature enterprise solution. He explains key philosophies, highlights pivotal moments like the "Simple Made Easy" talk, and showcases the vibrant Clojure community and its innovative tools.

All in development

Architecture & Design

The MVP Dilemma: Scale Now or Scale Later?

Scaling a system is a hard problem to solve. Underinvesting in scalability leads to a shortened lifespan for the system, but overinvesting can kill the MVP business case because of cost.

AI Infrastructure

Scaling Large Language Model Serving Infrastructure at Meta

Ye (Charlotte) Qi overviews LLM serving infrastructure challenges: fitting & speed (Model Runners, KV cache, and distributed inference), production complexities (latency optimization and continuous evaluation), and effective scaling strategies (heterogeneous deployment and autoscaling). Learn key concepts for robust LLM deployment.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Emerson Murphy-Hill on Engineering Productivity, Team Dynamics and Equity

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Emerson Murphy-Hill about how measuring developer productivity is tricky, why team dynamics and psychological safety matter more than things like meeting load, the impact of systemic bias and how new AI tools are shaping equity in engineering - sometimes helping, but sometimes risking new kinds of unfairness.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Inflection Points in Engineering Productivity as Amazon Grew 30x

In this article, Carlos Arguelles elaborates on how engineering productivity needs a shift as organizations scale. He shares examples from his time at Google and Amazon, explaining how some architectural decisions made at these companies shaped the way they develop software. Engineering productivity investments depend on inflection points, scale, controls, data, and tooling choices.