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Topics

Featured in Development

Go Channels: Understanding Happens-Before for Safe Concurrency

This article dives into the happens-before semantics of Go channels, explaining how they relate to memory visibility, synchronization, and concurrency correctness. We'll examine subtle pitfalls, illustrate them with examples, and explore the architectural implications for system designers.

Go Channels: Understanding Happens-Before for Safe Concurrency

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

If Architectures Could Talk, They’d Quote Your Boss

Software architecture reflects how organizations communicate and make decisions. Failures stem from misaligned incentives, unclear ownership, and structural gaps—not technical flaws. Architects must design not just systems, but the conditions for systems to thrive, using platform thinking to reduce friction and foster autonomy.

If Architectures Could Talk, They’d Quote Your Boss

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Deploy MultiModal RAG Systems with vLLM

Stephen Batifol discusses building and optimizing self-hosted, multimodal RAG systems. He breaks down vector search, nearest neighbor indexes (FLAT, IVF, HNSW), and the critical role of choosing the right embedding model. He then explains vLLM inference optimization (paged attention, quantization) and uses Mistral's Pixtral to detail multimodal large language model architecture.

Deploy MultiModal RAG Systems with vLLM

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

How to Always Get Invited to Big Strategic Conversations

Mark Allen discusses five key strategies for engineering leaders and architects to drive strategic impact and accelerate their careers. He explains how to identify what matters, build key cross-functional relationships, and craft an internal brand that attracts high-stakes, "green button" opportunities, culminating in a story of leading a project that saved his company 1ドル billion.

How to Always Get Invited to Big Strategic Conversations

All in culture-methods

Featured in DevOps

From Grassroots to Enterprise: Vanguard's Journey in SRE Transformation

Christina Yakomin shares Vanguard's SRE transformation: from quarterly testing of monoliths to a mature DevOps model with continuous delivery. She explains the SRE coaching hub, self-service tools, and advanced techniques like request-rate autoscaling. She details modern challenges, including region failure game days and testing AI-backed contact centers.

From Grassroots to Enterprise: Vanguard's Journey in SRE Transformation

Events

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QCon San Francisco 2025

Get production-proven patterns from the leaders who scaled a GenAI search platform to millions, migrated a core ML system without downtime, and architected a global streaming service from the ground up.

Early Bird ends Nov 11.

QCon AI New York 2025

Move beyond AI demos to real engineering impact. Discover how teams embed LLMs, govern models, and scale inference pipelines to accelerate development securely.

Early Bird ends Nov 11.

QCon London 2026

Benchmark your systems against leading engineering teams. See what really works in FinOps, modern Java, and distributed data architectures to balance cost, scale, and reliability.

Early Bird ends Nov 11.

InfoQ Homepage Presentations Scaling Dropbox

Architecture & Design

Scaling Dropbox

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41:02

Summary

Preslav Le talks about how Dropbox’s infrastructure evolved over the years, how it looks today, as well the challenges and lessons learned and tips addressing massive scale, consistency, architecture, MySQL, Memcache, and more.

Bio

Preslav Le has been a software engineer at Dropbox for the past three years, contributing to various aspects of Dropbox’s infrastructure including traffic, performance and storage. He was part of the core on-call and storage on-call rotations, dealing with high emergency real world issues from bad code pushes to complete datacenter outages.

About the conference

Software is changing the world. QCon empowers software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the developer community. A practitioner-driven conference, QCon is designed for technical team leads, architects, engineering directors, and project managers who influence innovation in their teams.

Recorded at:

Dec 20, 2016

by

Preslav Le

This content is in the QCon Software Development Conference topic

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