The InfoQ Podcast

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,...

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...

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 "f...

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 di...

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’ New...

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...

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: http...

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 disp...

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:...

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: Subscr...

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...

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...

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 mana...

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...

In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Lorin Hochstein about how real-world failures provide insight into how software systems actually work. Our first topic was understanding that while automated fault injection tools can introduce basic robustness into a system, they cannot replicate the understanding that comes from mitigating complicated software failures in the real world. We then pondered...

Are you ready for your new non-deterministic co-workers? Autonomous agents promise to help build, operate, and run software systems, but they can also be unpredictable, chaotic, and difficult to control without the right operating model. In this episode of Next Generation Architecture Playbook, Shweta Vohra and Joseph Stein explore what changes when software systems start planning, acting, and mak...

Andres Almiray, a serial open-source contributor and the creator of JReleaser, discusses the project's state, noting that the tool is usable across any ecosystem, not just Java. He also touches on the Common House Foundation's mission. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4sGNOFg Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experi...

In this episode, Thomas Betts and Sam McAfee discuss how AI hype is reshaping organizational behavior, why many companies struggle with experimentation, and how unclear decision structures create friction. They explore psychological safety and mindful leadership as essential foundations for healthier, more effective engineering cultures. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4l6G7FN...

This conversation explores why generative AI is not just another automation layer but a shift into autonomy. The key idea is that we cannot retrofit AI into old procedural workflows and expect it to behave. Once autonomy is introduced, systems will drift, show emergent behaviour, and act in ways we did not explicitly script. The real architectural shift is not about controlling every step, but abo...

In this episode, Thomas Betts talks with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, the author of Accelerate and one of the most prominent and important minds in DevOps and developer productivity. The conversation is about identifying and removing developer friction, the subject of her new book, Frictionless. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/40vbpMN Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter fo...

In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke with Chris Richardson about using microservices to modernize software applications and the use of artificial intelligence in software architecture. We first discussed the problems of monolithic enterprise software and how to use microservices to evolve them to enable fast flow - the ability to achieve rapid software delivery. The discussion also focused on so...

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Muzeeb Mohammad about building event-driven microservices for financial systems. The discussion covers some of the core principles and patterns for event-driven architectures, reasons for using these patterns, and some of the challenges related to finance and other highly-regulated industries. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3LZAgoI Subs...

AI coding assistants promise speed, but what do they mean for quality, trust, and the architect’s craft? In this inaugural episode of Next Gen Architecture Playbook, Shweta Vohra and Grady Booch explore a principled view of how architecture must evolve when machines begin writing code alongside humans. They unpack the third golden age of software engineering, where productivity gains are real, whe...

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. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4qhsIM6 Subscribe...

Erica Pisani, host of the performance and sustainability track at QCon London 2025, retrospects on the lessons learned from assembling the track and the lessons learned from attending the talks. She touches on the importance of the environmental-social aspects of software and hints on how developers can improve these aspects with small steps in the architecture and practices of building software....