Daily Reading List – December 6, 2024 (#455)

Big reading list today. I closed out a lot of my backlog of work, and reading. Enjoy your weekend!

[blog] Looking back at the first year of the Gemini era. It’s hard for me to believe that our flagship model(s) are only a year old. And at least as of today, the best option out there.

[article] VMware makes Workstation and Fusion free for everyone. Doesn’t matter if it’s for educational, commercial, or personal use. Now you can use this desktop hypervisor for free. There’s no support ticketing or troubleshooting offered, however.

[blog] The slow death of the hands-on engineering manager. I like this post. Don’t fall into the trap of giving up your tech chops just because you now manage/lead others.

[blog] GitLab CI Runners Rearchitecture From Nomad to Kubernetes. This is a modernization effort from the engineers at Seatgeek.

[blog] How to Be Resilient. Are you able to make forward progress, even when things get in the way? Difficulty is inevitable, and this post helps us think about how to keep moving.

[blog] Control your Generative AI costs with the Vertex API’s context caching. If you’re going to be interrogating a big chunk of data using an LLM, concepts like context caching will save you money.

[blog] Avoiding a Legacy Codebase. Keep it Evergreen. If you treat your code as an asset that needs constant care and feeding—as opposed to a ship and move-on mindset—it’s possible to keep it clean. Not easy though!

[blog] Moloco: 10x faster model training times with TPUs on Google Kubernetes Engine. Smart folks choose cloud when they want to scale and focus on things other than infrastructure management.

[blog] How Current leveraged Spanner to build a resilient platform for banking services. Same point. Instead of self-hosting, Current uses Spanner now and sees better resilience and perf.

[blog] The State Of Business Buying: Companies Still Struggle To Meet Buyer Expectations. Sheesh, these numbers are terrible. 87% of buyers are dissatisfied with who they chose after a purchasing process? Yikes.

[blog] Build agentic RAG on Google Cloud databases with LlamaIndex. Developers should have lots of integrations available when using a mainstream AI app building framework.

[blog] Ask the Community: What Do You Do When You Inherit a Giant Product Backlog? Great topic. What’s your response when you inherit a bunch of features and bugs from a predecessor?

[blog] How good are LLMs at fixing their mistakes? Cool stuff on the Hugging Face blog. To make it easier to understand, I fed it to Google Illuminate and made a podcast out of it.

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