InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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How to Shape the Engineering Culture in Software Companies
You can find your way through an organization by figuring out what artifacts people leave behind, David Grizzanti mentioned at InfoQ Dev Summit Boston. He compared culture to anthropology, suggested studying behaviors, power dynamics, and decisions first, and then patiently model and reward new norms, build allies, and use influence and leading by example, to shift engineering culture over time.
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HubSpot’s Sidekick: Multi-Model AI Code Review with 90% Faster Feedback and 80% Engineer Approval
HubSpot engineers introduced Sidekick, an internal AI powered code review system that analyzes pull requests using large language models and filters feedback through a secondary “judge agent.” The system reduced time to first feedback on pull requests by about 90 percent and is now used across tens of thousands of internal pull requests.
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QCon London 2026: SBOMs Move From Best Practice to Legal Obligation as CRA Enforcement Looms
In a talk at QCon London 2026, Viktor Petersson argued that software teams are running out of time to adopt SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials) due to pending legislative changes in both the US and Europe. He walked through the current regulatory landscape, spoke on the practical mechanics of generating high-quality SBOMs and on the emerging standards for distributing the resulting artefacts.
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QCon London 2026: Blurring the Lines: Engineering & Data Teams in the Age of AI
At QCon London 2026, Lada Indra, Head of Data Platform at Pleo, shared insights from his experience across high-scale data systems. He illustrated both the risks of poorly aligned teams and the practical strategies that organizations can adopt to bridge the gap.
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QCon London 2026: Shipping Constantly with Humans and Beyond at Monzo
At QCon London 2026, Suhail Patel, a principal engineer at Monzo who leads the bank’s platform group, described how the bank has built a developer platform capable of shipping hundreds of changes to production every day.
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Making Retrospectives Effective with Small Concrete Actions and Rotating Facilitators
Teams can run regular retrospectives that focus on 1–2 concrete weekly actions to avoid complaint circles, Natan Žabkar Nordberg mentioned at QCon London. You can rotate facilitators to build ownership, with each one bringing their own unique perspective. He suggested framing bigger changes as 4–6 week experiments, then vote to keep, tweak, or revert, ensuring learning and continuous improvement.
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Decentralizing Architectural Decisions with the Architecture Advice Process
Our system architectures have changed as technology and development practices have evolved, but the way we practice architecture hasn’t kept up. According to Andrew Harmel-Law, architecture needs to be decentralized, similar to how we have decentralized our systems. The alternative to having an architect take and communicate decisions is to “let anyone make the decisions” using the advice process.
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From Central Control to Team Autonomy: Rethinking Infrastructure Delivery
Adidas engineers describe shifting from a centralized Infrastructure-as-Code model to a decentralized one. Five teams autonomously deployed over 81 new infrastructure stacks in two months, using layered IaC modules, automated pipelines, and shared frameworks. The redesign illustrates how to scale infrastructure delivery while maintaining governance at scale.
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Lessons from Growing a Software Leadership Team
Thiago Ghisi explained how he guided managers and senior ICs to build a resilient leadership group beneath him in his talk Lessons from Growing Engineering Organizations at QCon London. Regular syncs, expectation calibration, and alignment on broader goals made leaders multipliers of culture and performance. Culture is what you do, not what you say.
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How a Small Enablement Team Supported Adopting a Single Environment for Distributed Testing
Po Linn Chia presented how they re-used a single development environment to deploy multiple service versions for testing their distributed system in her presentation "No QA Environment? No Problem" at Dev Summit Boston. A small enablement team, cultural buy-in, and gradual learning helped teams collaborate, reduce cognitive load, and scale testing practices.
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Creating Impactful Teams through Diversity Using Session 0
Diverse and empowered teams are impactful teams, Natan Žabkar Nordberg mentioned in his talk on creating impactful software teams at QCon London. A session 0 helps set expectations and ensures that everyone is approaching the team in a compatible way.
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Getting Feedback from Test-Driven Development and Testing in Production
Teams rely on strong unit and integration tests instead of end-to-end tests. Using TDD, pair programming, and good design, they ship small changes often, test in production for real feedback, and use feature toggles to reduce risk, Ola Hast and Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom mentioned in their talk about continuous delivery with pair programming.
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Building Software Organisations Where People Can Thrive
Continuous learning, adaptability, and strong support networks are the foundations for thriving teams, Matthew Card mentioned. Trust is built through consistent, fair leadership and addressing toxic behaviour, bias, and microaggressions early. By fostering growth, psychological safety, and accountability, people-first leadership drives resilience, collaboration, and performance.
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European Initiative for Data Sovereignty Released a Trust Framework
The Danube release of the Gaia-X trust framework provides mechanisms for the automation of compliance and supports interoperability across sectors and geographies to ensure trusted data transactions and service interactions. The Gaia-X Summit 2025 hosted facilitated discussions on AI and data sovereignty, and presented data space solutions that support innovation across Europe and beyond.
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Taking the Technical Leadership Path
Technical leaders face challenges beyond individual contributor work: aligning with business on investments, managing systemic aspects, mentoring, and keeping up with a changing codebase. We need technical alignment—shared codestyle, implementation patterns, and standards—to avoid accidental complexity. Leadership grows through practicing skills, improving team issues, and acting as a role model.