Daily Reading List – November 12, 2024 (#439)

There was so much thought-provoking content today! I enjoyed the pieces on refining strategy, giving feedback, running local LLMs, shipping products, and more.

[blog] Using systems modeling to refine strategy. how do you work through an engineering strategy? Will proposes using the ideas behind systems modeling and explains how to do it.

[article] High Performers Need Feedback, Too. Can we give more constructive feedback to our best teammates? Yes. This article has some examples of how to improve the quality of your feedback.

[blog] LLM Guard and Vertex AI. Mete has been looking at evaluation frameworks and this one is a security-related one. Make sure that you’ve got frameworks like this in mind as you start legitimately using LLMs.

[blog] Inside the Coming AI Market “Supercycle” and How Cloud Startups Can Benefit: The Battery Ventures 2024 State of OpenCloud Report. There’s some interesting analysis here, but if anything, skim through just to see the logos for vendors in the space.

[blog] All the ways to scrape Prometheus metrics in Google Cloud. Leonid shows how to grab monitoring metrics from VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless apps.

[blog] Everything I’ve learned so far about running local LLMs. Great post where Chris explores the tech and ideas around LLMs in a way that will make you want to try it too.

[blog] 5 Real-World Examples of Great API Error Messages. Why are they great? These include lots of useful info to understand what went wrong and offers help on fixing it.

[blog] Generating zero-shot personalized portraits. Need a new headshot? This post from Google Research shows off a new AI model that can transform selfies into different artistic styles.

[blog] Adopting Bazel for Web at Scale. Lots of details here from Airbnb about how they moved from bespoke scripts for their builds to a single tool.

[blog] How I ship projects at big tech companies. Somewhat cynical, but entirely reasonable perspective about what it takes to get a product out the door, and have it considered “shipped.”

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