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Culture & Methods

Developer Joy: A Better Way to Boost Developer Productivity

In this article, Holly and Trisha explore why joy isn’t a distraction from productivity: it’s the secret ingredient. From debugging brain waves in the middle of a jog to cutting out test flakiness, they explain how to reclaim developer satisfaction and boost output by embracing curiosity, minimizing friction, and giving ourselves a break.

Trisha Gee Holly Cummins
on Jun 04, 2025
AI, ML & Data Engineering

AI Interventions to Reduce Cycle Time in Legacy Modernization

In this article, we share our experiences and insights on how large language models (LLMs) helped us uncover and enhance the conceptual constructs behind software. We discuss how these approaches address the inherent complexity of software engineering and improve the likelihood of success in large, complex software modernization projects.

Michael Wytock Ken Judy Aaron Foster Breilyn
on May 21, 2025
Culture & Methods

How to Scale Your Impact at the Staff-Plus Level

This article demystifies what "Staff-Plus" expectations actually look like, drawing on real promotion and performance reviews experiences. It maps out career ladders, digs into promotion patterns and the key behaviors that consistently help high-performing engineers to reinvent themselves, and introduces the concept of "staff projects" which top performers use to drive their careers forward.

Thiago Ghisi
on May 19, 2025
Culture & Methods

From Code to Charisma: Emotional Mastery for Tech Leaders

In tech, leadership is about more than managing projects—it's about influencing teams and driving collaboration. This article explores how understanding the brain’s states—rational, emotional, and survival—can enhance decision-making and innovation. By mastering emotional regulation, trust, and psychological safety, leaders can empower teams to thrive and unlock their full potential.

Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg
on May 13, 2025
Culture & Methods

InfoQ Culture and Methods Trends Report - 2025

This report summarizes how the InfoQ Culture and Methods editorial team sees the ongoing and emergent trends in the culture and methods space.

Shane Hastie Charity Majors Ben Linders Rafiq Gemmail Craig Smith
on May 09, 2025
Architecture & Design

Legacy Modernization: Architecting Real-Time Systems around a Mainframe

At its heart, our transformation journey is about breaking dependencies at multiple levels. Many enterprises face similar challenges with legacy systems: tightly coupled architectures that are difficult to scale, change, or maintain. For us at National Grid, the solution came through four complementary paradigms that worked together to enable different forms of decoupling.

Jason Roberts Sonia Mathew
on Apr 30, 2025
Architecture & Design

Fitness Functions for Your Architecture

Software, its size, its requirements, and its infrastructure environment evolve over time. Software architecture should evolve accordingly, to meet current and future operational and developmental requirements. Fitness functions are guardrails that enable the continuous evolution of your system's architecture, within a range and a direction, that you desire and define.

Thomas Much
on Apr 14, 2025
Culture & Methods

Virtual Panel: Increasing Engineering Productivity, Develop Software Fast and in a Sustainable Way

Companies need to balance between rapid feature development and long-term product sustainability. Engineers are taking on more left-shifted, cognitive load as their features intersect with user privacy, security, accessibility, and regulations. We'll discuss approaches, philosophies, and techniques that companies and products applied to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of development.

Ben Linders Jennifer Bevan Sergii Gorbachov Jenna Butler
on Mar 05, 2025
AI, ML & Data Engineering

Building Trust in AI: Security and Risks in Highly Regulated Industries

Explore the transformative power of responsible AI across industries, emphasizing security, MLOps, and compliance. As AI drives innovation—from predicting hurricanes to enhancing legal workflows—organizations must prioritize ethical practices, transparency, and robust governance to safeguard sensitive data while navigating an evolving regulatory landscape.

Stefania Chaplin Azhir Mahmood
on Feb 10, 2025
Culture & Methods

Virtual Panel: How to Become a Principal Engineer

As a software engineer or individual contributor, the next step in your career can be to become a principal engineer. The path to becoming a principal engineer at companies can feel unclear, which can inhibit individual engineering careers. But that also provides opportunities for engineers to invent and shape the role of principal engineers.

Ben Linders Joy Ebertz Pablo Fredrikson Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg
on Dec 11, 2024
Development

Beat the Plan: Probabilistic Strategies for Successful Software Delivery at Scale

Large-scale software delivery demands managing complexity across teams and organizations. Similarly to betting strategies in Vegas, embracing probabilistic thinking helps tackle uncertainty, shifting from rigid plans to adaptive systems. By making informed bets and designing for change, leaders can control volatility, respond to evolving conditions, and drive success in dynamic environments.

John Rauser
on Dec 09, 2024
Culture & Methods

Reaching Your Automatic Testing Goals by Enhancing Your Test Architecture

If you have automatic end-to-end tests, you have test architecture, even if you’ve never given it a thought. Test architecture encompasses everything from code to more theoretical concerns like enterprise architecture, but with concrete, immediate consequences. Let's explore how you can achieve the goals you have for your automatic testing effort.

James Westfall
on Dec 04, 2024