Hi folks,

Thomas Betts, Senior Laureate Software Architect @Blackbaud and QCon San Francisco 2026 Program Committee member, put it well. AI isn't a separate topic anymore. It's the undercurrent in every engineering decision. That's reflected in our upcoming QCon conferences.

The QCon AI Boston 2026 schedule is live, featuring sessions by Mallika Rao, Engineering Leader @Netflix, Niko Matsakis, Senior Principal Engineer @Amazon, Ajay Prakash, Senior Staff Software Engineer @LinkedIn, and Jordan Nanos, Member of Technical Staff @SemiAnalysis. 

Enrollment for the May online InfoQ Architecture Program cohort with Luca Mezzalira, where you bring the actual decisions on your desk and get the honest version of what works in production, closes on Wednesday, May 6. 

The QCon San Francisco 2026 Program Committee has published the 12 tracks for the November conference. The Hyatt Regency QCon room block is 62% taken. Staying on-site means no commute, and you're already in the building for the early breakfast conversations. Pricing is $2,355 until May 12.

Groups of three or more get additional savings for QCon conferences. Teams that split across tracks and compare notes between sessions leave with a shared read on what to adopt and what to skip. Email info@qconferences.com with your group size.

See you in Boston or San Francisco.

InfoQ Certified Architect Program: May cohort closes May 6

If you spend years solving architecture problems inside one company, you naturally get locked into that mindset. Finding peers outside your organization who will give you the honest version, not the polite version, is hard. This is what the online InfoQ Certified Architect Program creates. It’s a five-week working group with Luca Mezzalira and a small cohort of senior engineers and software architects with at least 5 years' experience. You bring the decisions on your desk into a confidential environment with people from other industries who have actually built different systems.

Registration for the cohort starting May 7 closes Wednesday, May 6.

Register

QCon AI Boston, June 1-2: schedule is live

Program chairs Eder Ignatowicz, Senior Principal Software Engineer and Architect @Red Hat AI, Meryem Arik, Co-Founder and CEO @Doubleword, and Hien Luu, Sr. Engineering Manager @Zoox have built the QCon AI Boston 2026 schedule around the gap between an AI demo and a system that holds up under production load and audit.

Session highlights include:

There's a Mod for That: Opening Up AI Agent Development

Most agent tooling being written today is locked to one vendor's framework. Niko Matsakis, Senior Principal Engineer @Amazon and one of the lead designers of Rust, introduces portable agent mods built on the vendor-neutral Agent Client Protocol that work across any supporting agent.

Adaptive Recommenders in the Real World: Inference, Evals, and System Design

The deploy-once-then-monitor pattern that held up for recommendation systems through 2023 is breaking down as user behavior shifts faster than the retraining cadence can catch. Mallika Rao, Engineering Leader @Netflix, walks through how Netflix moved to a recommendation engine that learns continuously in production and what that costs operationally.

From Fab to Token: The State of the Market

GPU and inference decisions made in 2026 will lock in cost structure through 2028. Jordan Nanos, Member of Technical Staff @SemiAnalysis, looks at the physical and economic bottlenecks in the AI infrastructure market and the diverging strategies between hyperscalers and the specialized Neoclouds.

Final early bird pricing is $1,490 until May 12, then it's $1,590.

Secure your place.

QCon San Francisco, November 16-20: 12 tracks announced

The QCon San Francisco 2026 Program Committee have just published the 12 conference tracks.

Thomas Betts described the Program Committee's approach:

 "AI touches all the topics this year. Some tracks lead with it directly. In others, it's the undercurrent, where you're still doing software engineering, software architecture, leading engineering teams, but asking how do I do that with AI happening all around."

The conference tracks are:

• Architecting for Agents: Software architecture as autonomous agents become first-class actors. Orchestration, boundaries, control, and emergent behavior.

• Engineering AI Systems: Go beyond prototypes and into production, covering the realities of building, scaling, and maintaining AI-driven systems in the real world.

• Guardrails & Safety Nets (Evals) for the New Landscape: How teams are building evaluation systems, feedback loops, and safety mechanisms to make AI-powered systems reliable and trustworthy.

• Data Platforms Reimagined: Examine how modern data platforms are evolving to support real-time, AI-driven, and decentralized use cases, redefining how data flows through organizations.

• Architectures You've Always Wondered About: Systems you've heard about but never fully understood. Real architectures, trade-offs, and the decisions that shaped them.

• Something About Distributed Systems: Real-world lessons of building and operating distributed systems in production. Latency, consistency, failure, and scale.

• Resilience Engineering: Everything Fails All the Time: Learn how to design systems that expect failure, adapt to it, and continue operating under stress.

• Real World Platform Engineering: See how organizations are building internal platforms that actually work, balancing standardization with flexibility to accelerate developer productivity.

• Developer Experience as a First-Class Architecture Concern: Treat developer experience as a core architectural problem, exploring how tooling, workflows, and system design directly impact productivity and outcomes.

• Modern API Design: Sharpen your approach to designing APIs that stand the test of time, focusing on usability, evolvability, and real-world constraints.

• Staff+ Engineering Skills: What it really takes to operate at Staff+ level. From influencing without authority to driving technical strategy across teams and organizations.

• Code Beyond Engineers & Engineering Teams: Learn how coding is expanding beyond traditional engineers, into product, operations, and AI-assisted roles, and what this means for teams and systems.

Pricing is $2,355 until May 12.

Secure your place.