Daily Reading List – May 30, 2023 (#099)

Happy Tuesday! I had a great 3-day weekend and was able to recharge, read a few books, and enjoy time with the family. Today, I consumed some good content, had some lightbulb moments on prompt engineering for generative AI, and was able to get hands-on with some new tech. Good way to start the week.

[blog] Realizing cloud value for a render platform at Wayfair – Part 1. Cloud makes it easy (too easy?) to lift-and-shift your architecture. But as Wayfair learned, you’re going to waste money. I like these two posts (see part 2) that looks at the automation and right-sizing they introduced to save millions annually.

[article] IT security budgets are shifting as companies target risk reduction. Spending on IT security is slightly up, and the focus looks like it’s on risk reduction efforts.

[repo] Generative AI tutorials. We’ve got a good collection of resources in this GitHub repo if you’re interested in experimenting with generative AI. I learned a few things by reading through it and trying a few.

[blog] Monoliths – Good or Bad? This post does a good job calling out some of the dimensions of “monolithic” that we may lump together into one pile. Sometimes improving a handful of these is enough to get an improvement, without requiring a re-architecture.

[blog] New Batch connector for Workflows. It’s useful to know how something works, and THEN use an abstraction that hides the complexity. In this case, you know that you need to check the state of the batch job before proceeding in a workflow, but using a “connector” that does it for you is better than checking it yourself.

[podcast] Richard Seroter on Balancing Business and Technology Strategies. Audio and summary of a recent chat I had with the fine folks at Semaphore.

[blog] Developers, embrace application modernization with Migrate to Container’s new CLI. Google Cloud offers a fairly powerful managed service for extracting apps from VMs and creating container images. Now it’s available as a CLI.

[blog] 5 Rituals To Keep You Happy All The Time. It’s possible to be joyful even when things aren’t going great. Eric’s post looks at a few things you can do to keep a positive perspective.

[blog] Getting started with the PaLM API in the Java ecosystem. Soon, the interesting thing won’t be the LLM. It’ll be all the things we build with them. Fun use case here of building a “bedtime story generator.”

[docs] Migrate to PaLM API from Azure OpenAI. Here’s a look at how to map some of the concepts from Azure OpenAI to Google’s Vertex AI PaLM API.

[blog] Identity Crisis – A Tale of DevRel. Developer Relations has never been more important—whether enabling an internal team or, interacting with external developers—but it’s evolved over the past few years. Good read on what today’s DevRel needs to look like.

[blog] Cloud Bigtable under the hood: How we improved single-row read throughput by 20-50%. Bigtable is already one of the most high-performing databases anywhere, and the engineering team still found ways to improve performance in significant ways. This post digs in.

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