Daily Reading List – May 9, 2024 (#315)

Each day, I just read whatever pops into my feeds and newsletters. I’m not looking for a theme, but sometimes one pops out at me. Today? It seemed like a lot of content focused on optimization and doing things the right way. For example, check out items below about improving dev experience, efficient hosting of streaming platforms, doing CI well, controlling ops metrics volume, and scaling Kubernetes.

[article] Boost Developer Productivity by Reducing Their ‘Paper Cuts’. If you’re a small or mid-size tech team, what can you do to build a better dev experience for your team? This article offers an outstanding blueprint.

[article] 20 Lessons From 20 Different Paths to Product-Market Fit — Advice for Founders, From Founders. This is useful for founders, yes, but also for anyone building products that aim to solve a problem.

[blog] Three Laws of Software Complexity (or: why software engineers are always grumpy). Do well-designed systems always degrade into badly designed ones? Mahesh makes that argument, and others.

[paper] Capabilities of Gemini Models in Medicine. There’s 30+ pages of description and data in this new paper, and it may inspire you for use cases outside of medicine.

[blog] Yahoo Benchmarks Dataflow vs Self-managed Flink Efficiency for two Streaming use-cases– Which is More Cost-Effective? Some Yahoo! engineers wanted to compare the cost and performance of running their own data processing stack (on Kubernetes) or using a managed service.

[article] How is Flutter Platform-Agnostic? This framework renders interfaces across desktop, web, and mobile. how does it do that? Good deep dive here.

[article] Generative AI interest now shapes talent strategy, employers say. Makes sense. This likely impacts who you hire, how you train, and what you build.

[blog] Optimizing CI in Google Cloud Build. Darren wrote a fantastic post that’s helpful whether you’re using the Google Cloud services he mentions, or not.

[article] Microsoft and OpenAI’s increasingly complicated relationship. Partnerships are critical, and Microsoft does them well overall. But I’m glad Google has its own foundation models to bet on. A related perspective here.

[blog] Controlling metric ingestion with Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. If you’re drowning in metrics, and paying a lot for the privilege, consider some of the steps called out here.

[blog] The Streaming War Is Over and All It Cost Was the Entertainment Industry. Bundles versus individual best-of-breed is a pendulum. For streaming, we’re inevitably back at bundles.

[blog] The surprising economics of Horizontal Pod Autoscaling tuning. Some good advice here on autoscaling, with a clear view of the tradeoffs of setting different resource targets.

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