Daily Reading List – July 29, 2024 (#365)

Happy Monday. It was a busy day here, with 30 free minutes between 830am and 530pm. Most of my reading list time was early in the morning. Enjoy!

[article] Is Your Team Playing It Too Safe? We can say “incentivize big bets and don’t punish failure”, but people need to see that in action to believe it!

[blog] Analyzing video, audio and PDF files with Gemini and LangChain4j. Excellent post, not just because it uses tech I like. Guillaume used relatable examples and gave me confidence I could follow along.

[article] “Authentic” is dead. And so is “is dead.” I feel attacked by this post, which also be a phrase I can’t use anymore. I really liked Jason’s take on overused and nebulous terms that should be replaced by something with meaning.

[paper] Retrieval Augmented Generation or Long-Context LLMs? A Comprehensive Study and Hybrid Approach. Long context is a powerful tool in your toolbox. The model predictions mirror RAG in many cases, and this research paper proposes a better-together approach.

[article] The Guide to Going Multi-Product: 11 Tactics for Tackling Your Next Bet. If you’re looking at expanding your product portfolio (internally or externally), this article offers some good advice.

[article] SysAdmins split on AI’s impact, but still want training. It doesn’t feel shocking that IT admins will be slower to adopt AI. There are some compelling use cases, but I understand the hesitation.

[blog] Portable Training Data Generation for Supervised Fine-tuning: A Reverse RAG approach! Training set generation using an LLM? Be skeptical, but read along to see if this has merit.

[article] Why You Feel Underappreciated at Work. This was a good read, and encouraged a proactive approach versus just feeling sorry for ourselves.

[blog] DAGify: Accelerate Your Journey from Control-M to Apache Airflow. There’s so much wildly popular tech out there that I’ve never heard of. It’s humbling. Control-M is heavily used workload automation software. If you want to move to an open Airflow platform instead, this new open tool makes it easier.

[blog] Go 1.23: Interactive release notes. How easy are you making it for folks to try out the new thing that you released? Anton builds these “interactive release notes” for Go and I love it.

[blog] Cloud Run Idle Instance Conundrum. If you need “serverless” instances to stay online longer, you can sometimes be out of luck. but with Cloud Run, you can keep CPU always allocated.

[article] Thinking Like an Architect. Good architects are a huge value to a team; bad ones cause generational impact on the org. Gregor has a good piece on how good architects amplify smart people in the org and aim to make smart contextual decisions.

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