Once AI is in production, code arrives faster than it can be reviewed, token costs rise, evals have to be good enough to act on, and agents need permissions and guardrails. QCon AI New York 2026 (December 15-16) has confirmed sessions from engineers sharing how they handle these constraints. By Artenisa Chatziou
Nicholas Herring shares how EVE Online tackles distributed tracing and observability across a 20-year-old MMO architecture. He discusses leveraging head-based, dynamic exponential moving average (EMA), and deterministic sampling techniques to maintain high system fidelity, control telemetry costs, and avoid performance degradation under high-throughput real-time game simulations. By Nicholas Herring
Cloudflare has opened a closed beta of its OHTTP Gateway, a managed endpoint that decrypts Oblivious HTTP requests for an origin. The design choice drawing attention is a refusal: the Gateway will not decrypt requests arriving from Cloudflare Workers or from hosts proxied through Cloudflare, because that would put client identifiers and request contents in the same hands. By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Spotify reports that AI-assisted development more than doubled monthly merged changes, prompting a review of quality and reliability controls across its engineering organization. The company describes changes to testing, observability, rollback capacity, workload prioritization, and automated maintenance as it adapts to higher software change volume. By Leela Kumili
Erik Peterson discusses why AI spend is eclipsing cloud bills, triggering a major software engineering cost crisis. He explains tokenmaxxing, unit economics, forced developer promotions, and why fully autonomous AI will write, deploy, and govern code by 2028. By Erik Peterson
In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke to Joy Ebertz about how the use of artificial intelligence is changing the way architects and developers do their jobs. Focusing on the long term success of the business is one of the most neglected tasks of an architect. This task becomes particularly important as the nature of artificial intelligence changes the landscape of software development. By Joy Ebertz
Physical data layout is one of the most consequential decisions in lakehouse engineering. The author compares Liquid Clustering, ZOrdering, and partitioning across four workload types on Delta Lake, uncovering two undocumented failure modes that likely affect production systems today and offering a decision framework for choosing the right layout strategy. By Kushal Kumar Vishwakarma
React 19.3 was released on September 9, introducing several features including the react-dom browser() API. This API allows components to opt out of server-side rendering, addressing issues with components that rely on client-specific data. It provides a cleaner solution for managing hydration mismatches and supports conditional data fetching, enhancing flexibility for developers. By Daniel Curtis
This week's Java roundup for October 5th, 2026, features news highlighting: OpenJDK JEPs Proposed to Target for JDK 28; Lazy Constants elevated to Candidate status; the GA releases of Apache Grails 8.0 and Open Liberty 20.0.0.10; point releases of TornadoVM, Infinispan, LangChain4j and Spock; and a maintenance release of GlassFish. By Michael Redlich
Apple is introducing a new JSON-based format for Xcode project configuration files, replacing the traditional property-list-based format. Available in Xcode 27.2, the new format aims to improve readability, simplify maintenance, and make project configuration easier for AI coding agents to understand and modify. By Sergio De Simone
GitLab has released version 19.4 of its DevSecOps platform, adding a goal-driven mode to GitLab Duo CLI, three hosted open-weight models, a larger set of Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, and more detailed controls for AI spending. By Matt Saunders
Researchers from Meta, MIT, and the University of Washington introduce Context Language Models (CLMs), a new approach that enables language models to manage and edit their own context rather than relying on predefined mechanisms for summarization, compression, and information retrieval, reporting substantial gains in both performance and computational efficiency. By Sergio De Simone
