Daily Reading List – May 13, 2024 (#317)

I had my rehearsal at Google I/O today, and then attended a half-day offsite with my team. Before that, I read a bunch of things you’ll find below.

[article] AI-assisted code authoring at scale. When Meta rolled out AI assisted tools to their engineers, what were the results? This post reviews a paper with the details.

[blog] Keeping Up with Tech. This post was mainly about being a t-shaped developer, with a mention of how to find the “next thing” to learn about.

[blog] I built the same app with Flutter, React Native, and Ionic. You can learn a lot by using different languages or frameworks to solves the same problem. Here’s a look at three popular app frameworks.

[article] How to Present to an Audience That Knows More Than You. Many folks dislike public speaking. It can be even more nerve-wracking if you know the audience is smarter than you on a given topic. That’s often the case! This article has some advice for those situations.

[blog] Unlocking Codebase Insights with Vertex AI Gemini 1.5 Pro: A Comprehensive Guide. What questions would you ask of an inherited codebase? Where are the security issues? How should I troubleshoot? What does each component do? This post shows examples for AI-based interrogation.

[article] Do Enormous LLM Context Windows Spell the End of RAG? Somewhat related to the previous piece. If I can send in all my code to an LLM, I may not need it chunked up and vector-stored prior.

[blog] Good Suffering. Bob has a good reminder that “resilience” is a developed characteristic, and talks about having “high standards and low expectations.”

[blog] Using Google’s Gemini Function Calling to Fetch Real-Time Company News and Insights from External APIs. This is a good example of “function calling” as a technique for getting real-time data into your generative AI apps.

[blog] How to (and how not to) design REST APIs. Derek affirms and rejects some “conventional wisdom” around HTTP (or REST) APIs.

[article] IT services spend will reach $2 trillion by 2028: Forrester. Spending is up, especially on cloud. But this notes that cloud spending is still less than 10% of the IT services spend!

[blog] Billed for unauthorized requests? Google Cloud Storage vs. AWS S3. This topic came up a week or so ago when a user got a massive bill for unauthorized 403 requests to their Amazon S3 bucket. AWS is fixing that, and this post looks at whether you’re at the same risk on Google Cloud. Hint: you’re not.

[blog] Podless Kubernetes. As an academic exercise, could you deploy a full Kubernetes cluster and mesh in a single node binary, without any pods running? John did just that.

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