The conversations you can't stream
QCon London is where senior software engineers, software architects, and technical leaders compare notes on what actually happened in production - the trade-offs, the failures, and the implementation lessons that only come from production experience.
You can watch conference talks online. But you can't stream the conversations that happen between sessions.
At QCon London, the talks provide the framework.
The real value is in the peer exchanges: whiteboard sessions where practitioners debug approaches together, unconferences focused on practical implementation, and hallway conversations where senior engineers share hard-won insights from production experience.
These unrecorded moments - comparing notes over coffee, drawing architectures on whiteboards, hearing what actually happened from someone who already tried it - that's where the most valuable learning happens.
One conversation with someone who's already shipped a similar system can change your entire approach.
That's the difference between learning from documentation and learning from someone who can tell you what actually broke when they scaled it.
The value of peer conversations at QCon:
- Test your assumptions against people who've already shipped
- Honest peer discussions about what worked and what didn't
- Learn from senior practitioners, not product evangelists.
The senior practitioners facilitating these conversations at QCon London 2027 include:
- Protecting Systems from Humans and Agents, hosted by Chris Swan, Engineer @atsigncompany and InfoQ Editor
- Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, hosted by Shawna Martell, Principal Software Engineer @Imprint, previously @Carta, @Yahoo, @Verizon, and @Wolfram
- Designing the SDLC for the Next Era of Software Engineering, hosted by Blanca Rojo, Executive Director, Distinguished Engineer, and Cloud Engineer @UBS
- Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Platform Engineer, Co-Author of “Mastering API Architecture,” Java Champion, and InfoQ News Manager
- Staff+ Engineering Skills, hosted by Vanessa Formicola, Principal Architect and Head of TASC @Prima, previously @Thoughtworks and @Microsoft
The signal-to-noise ratio is incredibly high. There is no vendor bias. It is just engineers speaking to engineers about what actually works in production.
Luca Mezzalira, Principal Solutions Architect @ AWS