Daily Reading List – May 16, 2024 (#320)

Heading home today after a few days away from home, and I learned a lot this week. I enjoyed the items in my reading queue today, and I think you’ll like them too.

[article] Use Engineering Strategy to Reduce Friction and Improve Developer Experience. Can it be “simple” to create an engineering strategy that aligns the team, improves focus, and helps you make decisions faster? Will tries to prove that in this talk.

[blog] Optimize Your Athletic Performance with Gemini and Vertex AI. You should read this. We built this amazing physical demo that folks love, but it also shows all sorts of ways to use AI and cloud services to get an outcome that non-techies understand and enjoy.

[blog] Automatically disabling leaked service account keys: What you need to know. It’s opt-in, but I really like the idea of automatically disabling account keys found in public repos within GitHub or Gitlab.

[blog] The Cost Crisis in Metrics Tooling. Charity says that folks are collecting so many metrics that cost us a fortune, and don’t tell us much.

[blog] Introducing Aparna Sinha, Capital One’s Head of AI Product. My former colleague has an exciting new role, and it makes me wonder if we’ll see this position created at many different enterprise companies.

[article] Google Cloud’s Matt Renner: “Half of all AI PoCs are just a bad idea.” I don’t mind if the POCs are bad ideas as long as folks can run quick experiments. But Matt’s point is sound, and Google has staffed up to reduce your rate of failure.

[article] Research: What Companies Don’t Know About How Workers Use AI. Trust is a big angle in this story, whether that’s between management and employees, or models and companies.

[blog] Why do only a small percentage of GenAI projects actually make it into production? Continuing a theme from the last few articles, this one explores why companies can struggle to convert their AI dreams into monetizable products.

[docs] LlamaIndex on Vertex AI for RAG overview. AI experiments can go faster when you use frameworks that make it simpler. Just 30 lines of code to ingest data, index it, augment LLM retrieval, and generate results?

[article] How does developer satisfaction lead to improved productivity? Lizzie looks at the SPACE framework and some self-reported data that can help you make better decisions about your dev experience.

[article] Kora: A cloud-native redesign of the Apache Kafka engine. This looks like a major update, and one that’s heavily influenced by Confluent’s work running a global, multi-cloud managed service.

[blog] What’s new in Flutter 3.22. WebAssembly, and more in this latest release of the popular framework for mobile and web apps. More coverage here.

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