Daily Reading List – March 19, 2024 (#279)

I spent most of today in an onsite offsite meeting, and it was great seeing some colleagues I don’t get to hang out with all the time. In between sessions, I got some good reading in.

[blog] Google named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024. I also read the underlying report this morning, and there’s an impressive set of vendors in this space right now. While we’re tops, it’s a reminder that you should be “buying” expertise and agility, not hardware right now. The landscape and use cases are still emerging!

[article] How (in)efficient are engineering organizations? Here’s a quick look at some data showing that about a quarter of a developer’s time is lost to inefficiency.

[article] How to Store Embeddings in Vector Search and Implement RAG. The process of customizing LLM responses will keep getting easier, especially with managed services in the picture.

[article] When You Have to Make a Strategic Decision Without Much Data. Sometimes (often?) you don’t have the data available that could help you make a confident decision. This article talks about three ways to set a course forward.

[blog] Istio announces the beta release of ambient mode. Service meshes are starting to get a little simpler, and a proxy-less architecture will be popular in the years ahead.

[article] Early generative AI adopters at higher risk of tech debt. It’s guaranteed that something you’re doing with generative AI today will be obsolete in a year. That’s the nature of fast-evolving technology. But that work isn’t in vain, as this article points out.

[blog] 8 years later: A world Go champion’s reflections on AlphaGo. I remember this was a big deal when it happened. Here, we revisit the “win” by AI and what Lee Sae Dol did afterwards.

[article] Notes on Product management theater. Product guru John analyzes answers from product guru Marty in a recent podcast. Good work.

[blog] Unify analytics with Spark procedures in BigQuery, now generally available. BigQuery is such a fascinating, unified platform for analytics. So many things in a single place, accessible through SQL queries.

[blog] Leverage Go’s Concurrency: Transforming API Data Fetching with Goroutines and Channels. This is a complex language feature, but powerful. And I’d probably learn it by asking generative AI to produce some code on my behalf.

[article] C++ creator rebuts White House warning. Is C++ memory safe? Its creator says to chill out on all the “don’t use C++” talk.

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