In this issue, April 29, 2025 View it in your browser.

LLM Prompt Injection, Custom LLMs, AI & the CLI, Azure MCP Server, MSVC Build Insights, LittleHorse Orchestration, .NET Aspire 9.2, Legacy Architecture, CapitalOne Serverless, Engineering Productivity

QCon AI 2025 (Dec 16-17): Real stories of scaling AI-assisted software delivery at enterprise level.

Join us in NYC to learn how senior engineers are using AI to accelerate software delivery—reliably, safely, and at scale. QCon AI 2025 brings real-world case studies, MLOps playbooks, and proven patterns from teams aligning data science, ML, and software engineering. Save with launch pricing before May 13.

 

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Building Empathy and Accessibility: Fostering Better Engineering Cultures and Developer Experiences

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Erin Doyle about her journey as a generalist engineer, her passion for web accessibility, the importance of empathy and psychological safety in engineering teams, and her commitment to building better developer experiences by fostering collaboration, continuous learning, and vulnerability among technical professionals. (Podcast)

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Implement the EU Cyber Resilience Act's Requirements to Strengthen Your Software Project

Eddie Knight, OSPO lead at Sonatype, discusses how the EU Cyber Resilience Act can help with improving your software project’s security and in the same time to slow down the alarming acceleration of software supply chain attacks. (Podcast)

TOP AI, ML & Data Engineering NEWS HEADLINES

  1. DeepMind Researchers Propose Defense Against LLM Prompt Injection

  2. Microsoft Native 1-Bit LLM Could Bring Efficient genAI to Everyday CPUs

  3. Google DeepMind Introduces QuestBench to Evaluate LLMs in Solving Logic and Math Problems

  4. Docker Model Runner Aims to Make it Easier to Run LLM Models Locally

From "Simple" Fine-Tuning to Your Own Mixture of Expert Models Using Open-Source Models

Sebastiano Galazzo discusses the practicalities of creating custom LLMs and shares real-world tips and common mistakes. Learn cost-effective fine-tuning (LoRA), powerful model merging ("Franken models"), Mixture of Experts, multimodal capabilities & key performance optimizations (pruning, quantization) for maximum value and relevance to senior software developers and engineering leaders. (Presentation with transcript included)

How Green is Green: LLMs to Understand Climate Disclosure at Scale

Leo Browning explains the journey of developing a RAG system at a climate-focused startup. He shares insights on overcoming challenges in applying LLMs to a complex domain, focusing on accuracy, auditability, and scalability. He covers the evolution of search techniques, the role of human-in-the-loop workflows, and strategies for optimizing RAG systems for real-world financial applications. (Presentation with transcript included)

GenAI for Productivity

Mandy Gu discusses Wealthsimple's journey leveraging generative AI, starting with employee productivity and extending to client-facing operational optimization. Learn about their LLM gateway, PII redaction, self-hosting, RAG, and the evolution of their build vs. buy strategy. (Presentation with transcript included)

TOP DevOps NEWS HEADLINES

  1. Edera Protect 1.0 Now Generally Available

  2. Amazon Q and Claude Code Let AI Control the Developer CLI

Google Go Module Mirror Served Backdoor for 3+ Years

In February 2025, researchers at Socket uncovered a significant supply chain attack within the Go programming ecosystem. A malicious package, named github.com/boltdb-go/bolt, was discovered impersonating the legitimate and widely-used BoltDB module. (News)

TOP Cloud NEWS HEADLINES

  1. Google Cloud Announces Firestore with MongoDB Compatibility

  2. Azure MCP Server Enters Public Preview: Expanding AI Agent Capabilities

  3. Gemini to Arrive On-Premises with Google Distributed Cloud

Distributed Cloud Computing: Enhancing Privacy with AI-Driven Solutions

Distributed cloud, PETs, and AI enable secure, private data processing. This integration enhances collaboration, security, and compliance across marketing, finance, and healthcare, addressing the growing need for data protection. (Article)

TOP Development NEWS HEADLINES

  1. Activision Reduces Build Time of Call of Duty by 50% with MSVC Build Insights

Fast Eventual Consistency: Inside Corrosion, the Distributed System Powering Fly.io

Innovative cloud solutions expert Somtochi Onyekwere recently presented at QCon London 2025, unveiling Corrosion—Fly.io's advanced open-source distributed system. By leveraging CRDTs and Rust, Corrosion enhances scalability and data synchronization, addressing latency challenges and ensuring rapid, consistent application deployment across a global network of 40+ regions. (News)

TOP Java NEWS HEADLINES

  1. QCon London 2025 Day 2: the Form of AI, Securing AI Assistants, WASM Components in FaaS

  2. Java News Roundup: JDK 25 Schedule, Spring 7.0-M4, Payara Platform, JobRunr 7.5, Jox 1.0, Commonhaus

  3. OpenJDK News Roundup: Compact Source, Module Import Declarations, Key Derivation, Scoped Values

LittleHorse, a Java Workflow Engine for Distributed Systems Orchestration

LittleHorse is a Java open-source platform designed to orchestrate distributed systems, addressing the challenges related to state management and the coordination of microservices, external APIs, and human tasks. It allows developers to define workflows programmatically using languages such as Java, Go, Python, C#/.NET, eliminating the need for specialized DSLs. (News)

TOP .NET NEWS HEADLINES

  1. Microsoft Extends SLNX Solution File Support in .NET CLI

  2. .NET AI Chat Web App Template Preview 2 Released with Qdrant and .NET Aspire Support

.NET Aspire 9.2 Released with Expanded Deployment Options and Dashboard Improvements

The .NET team has released version 9.2 of .NET Aspire, introducing updates to the dashboard experience, new integration capabilities, and deployment improvements. As stated in the official announcement, this release furthers the platform’s goal of simplifying application development and cloud-native deployment workflows. (News)

TOP Architecture & Design NEWS HEADLINES

  1. AWS Promotes Responsible AI in the Well-Architected Generative AI Lens

Renovate to Innovate: Fundamentals of Transforming Legacy Architecture

Rashmi Venugopal explores the inevitability of legacy systems in successful companies and the importance of transforming legacy systems to accelerate innovation. Rashmi discusses various strategies to tackle such technical renovation initiatives, like evolutionary architecture, deprecation-driven development, and intentional organization design. (Article)

Optimizing Search at Uber Eats

Janani Narayanan and Karthik Ramasamy share Uber Eats' scaling challenges for nX merchant growth. They detail optimizing retrieval, fixing latency from naive scaling, and root causes in ingestion/query layers. Learn about benchmarking, geosharding impact, and their Apache Lucene search platform evolution. (Presentation with transcript included)

Lessons & Best Practices from Leading the Serverless First Journey at CapitalOne

George Mao explains Capital One's serverless-first approach, driven by efficiency and regulatory needs. He shares valuable lessons on CI/CD, concurrency, and cost management, along with actionable best practices for development (SDKs, runtimes), deployment (packaging, ARM), and observability for senior software developers and architects. (Presentation with transcript included)

TOP Culture & Methods NEWS HEADLINES

  1. Inflection Points in Engineering Productivity for Improving Productivity and Operational Excellence

QCon London: AI Agents Can Work Together to Make Humans Better

In a well-received closing keynote at QCon London 2025, independent AI consultant Hannah Foxwell challenged the common narrative about AI making us more productive and helping us to do more, instead arguing that AI agents should be designed to eliminate mundane work for us rather than replace human jobs. (News)

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