Daily Reading List – July 15, 2024 (#355)

Happy Monday! I had a productive weekend and also a lot of fun with the family. During some quiet time, I wrote up a blog post about using Apache Kafka in the cloud. That was the result of a dozen or so hours of experimentation during my vacation week.

[article] What exactly is an AI agent? There’s not exactly consensus here, so this article explores how a handful of folks are defining it.

[youtube-video] The software engineering industry in 2024: what changed in 2 years, why, and what is next. Here’s an excellent talk from Gergely on a wide range of topics including career progress in tech, choosing boring tech, and what to do with AI.

[docs] Disaster recovery planning guide. How often are you exercising your DR plans? Be honest with me. Do you have DR plans that you trust? This is a great set of documentation for those properly planning for disasters.

[article] Are You Done Yet? Mastering Long-Running Processes in Modern Architectures. I shared some pieces last week about long-running HTTP requests, and here’s more about design considerations for long-running processes.

[blog] Text classification with Gemini and LangChain4j. This is a terrific look at text classification techniques with generative AI. All Java fans should be reading Guillaume if they aren’t already.

[article] As CISOs grapple with the C-suite, job satisfaction takes a hit. There’s a lot of pressure on the top security folks, and their satisfaction seems connected to how well they can access and impact senior leaders.

[blog] Cloud CISO Perspectives: How to think about security budgets. Phil offers fresh guidance for CISOs as they plan for budget requests.

[article] Designing a Successful Reskilling Program. Are you planning or running a reskilling program right now? I thought this article had good guidance on metrics, bringing the team along, and providing the right air cover.

[blog] Flexible committed-use discounts are now even more flexible. Smart tech leaders use whatever financial instruments they have at their disposal, and CUDs are an important one. I like that you can now use them across compute products in Google Cloud.

[blog] GenAI or Die. Some blazing hot perspective, but I do think the underlying point is right. This time it’s different, and disruption is going to hit some harder than others.

[blog] Safeguarding App Health and Consumer Experience with Metric-Aware Rollouts. The Doordash Engineering team does a nice job explaining the metrics they track during rollouts, how they support experimentation, and more.

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