In this episode, Alex Zenla (CTO/Co-founder, Edera) challenges the "laissez-faire" attitude toward modern infrastructure. She promotes "spite-driven development", building software to solve genuine technical pain points rather than passively accepting flawed abstractions, as a philosophy of improving the world of software. The discussion touches on the fragility of the current cloud-native stack, the security risks of multi-tenant Linux kernels, and the inefficiency of repurposing consumer-grade GPUs for AI workloads. Zenla also offers a pragmatic framework for the "AI-native" engineer: treat LLMs as symbiotic assistants for deep learning, not replacements for system-level expertise.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3QZQhxc

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In this episode, Heroku co-founder and Ink & Switch founder Adam Wiggins argues for a 'local-first' architecture that reconciles cloud-based collaboration with the performance and data ownership of local software. He explores the role of CRDTs and version control primitives in non-code domains, and examines how a hybrid AI future might leverage local models for core productivity tasks, challenging the current over-reliance on centralised cloud compute.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4gkg6m7

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Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

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Daniel Finneran explores how eBPF has evolved far beyond its roots in packet filtering into a robust, safe way to extend the Linux kernel. He explains how the eBPF "verifier", the security guardrail, enables implementation of deep observability and networking without the risks of traditional kernel modules or the slow upstreaming process. He touches on tools like Tetragon that leverage eBPF for "front-foot" security enforcement, proactively intercepting threats such as buffer overflows before they execute, while providing visibility into file systems and drivers without intrusive instrumentation.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4ew9ONB

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Martin Kleppmann, an associate professor at Cambridge and author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, discusses the evolution of data systems over the last decade, mainly the shift from monolithic databases to modular building blocks. Kleppmann underlines the importance of moving from cloud-centric data storage systems to decentralised data storage similar to Bluesky’s AT protocol. He also dives into explaining the local-first movement and the importance of users owning their data.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4vXoT1V

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Birgitta Böckeler, Distinguished Engineer at Thoughtworks, returns to discuss the rapid evolution of AI in software delivery. She touches on the evolution from vibe coding, the changing tools landscape and the more autonomous agents that, besides higher velocity, introduce higher risk.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4o62JHU

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In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Sonya Natanzon about the intersection of technical and social aspects of software architecture. Understanding the business and how a company operates is more important than the specific technologies used. Effective requirements analysis requires focusing on problems to be solved that describe good and bad outcomes, rather than statements of need or solution statements. Embracing constraints enable architects to narrow down the available options, which makes designing the system architecture much easier.

It is often better to use techniques from approaches like Domain-Driven Design or Event Storming without formally introducing the methodology to the team. This will increase their effectiveness by reducing people's natural resistance to formal methods. The future of training new engineers will come from their ability to explain and review code, and learning how to fix broken systems.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4vVegND

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Gunnar Morling, technologist at Confluent and Java Champion, shares his experiences with building high-performance applications in Java, especially in the data space. He shares insights from experiments with building durable execution engines, bootstrapping, and AI natively developing Apache Hardwood - a minimal dependencies Java parser for Apache Parquet.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/49cwnoI

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In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Baruch Sadogursky about software architecture in the age of agentic AI. Large Language Models can function, albeit stochastically, as reasoning machines capable of interpreting human ambiguity. With the appropriate rigorous context artifacts to control the LLM’s reasoning, software specifications can become the source of truth, while the code becomes a disposable intermediate language. These context artifacts are managed through an engineering discipline, context engineering. Unlike prompt engineering which Sadogursky likened to “voodoo incantations”, context engineering utilizes artifacts such as skills, rules, scripts, feedback, and rigorous evaluation to provide the models with clear intent on what code to write. AI Agents will ask clarifying questions to the architects and clients until the requirements are fully understood. This allows a massive “shift left” to evaluate code quality before it is even written. Testing now validates the accuracy of the specifications.

Humans are still responsible for determining the correctness of the requirements by providing the proper context, and validating the final results. Since changes over the course of time will occur, resulting in the regeneration of the code from the specifications, microservices is the best architectural paradigm to use given the current limitations on context windows for LLMs. Orchestration of the services is then done by a human architect to create the application. The architect is also responsible for managing the emergent properties of the system.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/48YWu2n

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Adam Bien, an independent consultant and pioneer of zero dependencies in the enterprise world of Java, highlights the benefits of consistently using standards, regardless of whether they involve Java or existing patterns. He argues that by doing so, he managed to future-proof the systems he built, preparing them for the cloud era and even for the AI-Native era.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4cFAn3g

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Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

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Andy Damevin, a developer who worked on Quarkus for almost a decade, talks about Roq. A project that started as an experiment to try to see if it’s possible to build a static web site generator on top of quarkus. He touches on the rationale for choosing Java and Quarkus, how to migrate to Roq, and the platform's future.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/48Q5SoJ

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QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

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QCon San Francisco 2026 (November 16-20, 2026)

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

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