InfoQ - QCon Software Development Conference - Presentations

Presentation: Architecting the Data Layer for AI Agents: from Transactional Systems to MCP and Semantic Models

Fabiane Nardon — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Fabiane Nardon shares how TOTVS prepares enterprise data for token-hungry AI agents. She discusses balancing deterministic logic and non-deterministic LLMs across precision, security, and cost. Nardon details using data mesh, low-latency database architectures, semantic ontologies, and dynamic MCP tool selection to optimize context windows and reduce token overhead in transactional systems.

By Fabiane Nardon

Presentation: From DVDs to Global Streaming: How Netflix’s Commerce Architecture Actually Evolved

Kasia Trapszo — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Kasia Trapszo discusses how Netflix evolved its commerce platform from a U.S. DVD service into global infrastructure. She explains navigating international payment realities, adapting to strict regulatory mandates, decomposing monolithic architectures along domain boundaries, and re-architecting systems for massive live-event demand - proving great systems survive by continually evolving.

By Kasia Trapszo

Presentation: Python, Numba, and Algorithm Design: Building Efficient Models in Financial Services

Chad Schuster — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:23:00 GMT

Chad Schuster discusses bridging Python's developer velocity with C-like performance using Numba JIT and GPUs. Drawing from large-scale actuarial modeling, he explains LLVM pipeline architecture, performance gains up to 750x, and essential trade-offs like OOP limits, type inference errors, and compile-time overhead for engineering leaders scaling compute-heavy enterprise systems.

By Chad Schuster

Presentation: Can Claude Fix Itself? Using LLMs for Incident Response

Alex Palcuie — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Anthropic reliability engineer Alex Palcuie shares practical lessons on using LLMs for real-world incident response. He explains where AI acts as a superhuman for observing logs and traces, why it still struggles with causation versus correlation during root-cause analysis, and how engineering leaders can integrate AI into on-call workflows without eroding human expertise.

By Alex Palcuie

Presentation: Continuous Delivery for Foundational Platforms

Ian Nowland — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:34:00 GMT

Ian Nowland discusses why conventional CI/CD practices break down for stateful, core infrastructure. Drawing from his leadership at AWS and Datadog, he shares actionable techniques for safe progressive deployments, synthetic testing in production, and mitigating blast radius in complex software platforms.

By Ian Nowland

Presentation: Prompt to Prod: Engineering an Autonomous SDLC at Scale

Andrew Swerdlow — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Andrew Swerdlow shares how Roblox scales autonomous software development from prompt to production. He discusses building robust security sandboxes, extracting institutional knowledge via code review exemplars, updating engineering infrastructure, and redefining productivity metrics around feature velocity and long-running AI turns to achieve trusted, automated deployment at scale.

By Andrew Swerdlow

Presentation: SafeChat: Building AI-Powered Safety Systems at Scale in a Real-Time Marketplace

Bruna Pereira — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Bruna Pereira explains how DoorDash built a content-agnostic AI moderation platform. She covers replacing costly LLM-only pipelines with a hybrid pattern: using fast internal models to filter obvious cases, LLM multi-axis scoring for nuanced decisions, and no-code workflows with backtesting. Discover how this architectural pattern cut safety incidents while scaling to millions of daily messages.

By Bruna Pereira

Presentation: Enchant Your AI and APIs with eBPF Magic 🪄

Dan Finneran — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Dan Finneran discusses the risks of unowned AI-generated code in production and demonstrates how eBPF can intercept and control AI API traffic in Kubernetes. He explains how kernel-level socket hooks enable transparent prompt filtering, model swapping, token limits, and syscall restrictions to secure AI agents without modifying application source code or restarting containers.

By Dan Finneran

Presentation: Why Fetch When You Can Sync? Building Local-First Apps on a Sync Engine Architecture

James Arthur — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:19:00 GMT

James Arthur shares why sync is the next frontier in frontend architecture. He explains how extending reactivity to the server with Electric and TanStack DB replaces imperative fetching with declarative data bindings. Learn how query-driven sync and local optimistic updates enable engineering leaders to build insanely fast, collaborative, and agentic applications using their existing stack.

By James Arthur