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 Newsletter: Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter InfoQ online certification cohorts: Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/ Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of practitioners. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

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 Newsletter: Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter InfoQ online certification cohorts: Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/ Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of practitioners. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

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 Newsletter: Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter InfoQ online certification cohorts: Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/ Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of practitioners. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

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 Newsletter: Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter InfoQ online certification cohorts: Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/ Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of practitioners. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

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 Newsletter: Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter InfoQ online certification cohorts: Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/ Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of practitioners. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

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 Newsletter: Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter InfoQ online certification cohorts: Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/ Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of practitioners. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

In this podcast, Jaromir Hamala, a seasoned Java engineer specialising in high-throughput data systems, shares his thoughts on how developers can tackle high-performance software development. He touches on the benefits of modern Java that allow writing idiomatic Java code while remaining "mechanically sympathetic", and also on his experience debugging a Linux kernel bug. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4mIDdrA Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of experts. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Matthew Liste about building and managing software platforms. Platform services act as the basis for application development, and must always be stable, secure, and scalable. Scaling these systems is particularly difficult because unknown resource contention often causes them to break. Using customer journeys, one can pinpoint the places where the system is particularly at risk. Platform engineering also requires managing limited resources, and making difficult tradeoffs about which functionality should be implemented. The discussion also highlighted how artificial intelligence can increase the speed of development and thus increase risk, and how it interferes with the development of junior engineers who typically learn from basic tasks that now can be done by artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, platform engineering is still responsible for maintaining the stability, security, and scalability of the platform. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3PDl16i Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of experts. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

Viktor Peterson, part of the CISA task force working on SBOM blueprints and co-founder of sbomify, explores the shifting landscape of software supply chain security as the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) comes into force, a "GDPR moment" for the industry. Beyond mere compliance, Peterson argues that SBOMs provide significant operational value as tools for automated security audits and license management, provided they are generated using ecosystem-specific tools rather than generic scanners. He also points to providing critical security insights into the risks of weaponised code, citing recent incidents where security tools themselves became attack vectors, and emphasises the need for vendor-neutral discovery mechanisms like the Transparency Exchange API (TEA) to secure the software lifecycle. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/41eFG34 Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of experts. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

In this episode, Thomas Betts and Adi Polak talk about the need for context engineering when interacting with LLMs and designing agentic systems. Prompt engineering techniques work with a stateless approach, while context engineering allows AI systems to be stateful. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4168Wcj Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai 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: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom# - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of experts. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq