Daily Reading List – March 17, 2025 (#513)

It was great being back in my regular office today on my regular hours. Every time I travel outside the US West Coast, I gain empathy for everyone we torture with California-friendly meeting times.

[blog] Inside the launch of FireSat, a system to find wildfires earlier. How completely awesome is this? Satellites detecting the beginning of wildfires so we can address them faster.

[article] Preserving Craft in the Era of AI. Learn to code. Struggle through tasks until you learn them. None of that should change just because we have AI for shortcuts.

[blog] Beyond the 70%: Maximizing the human 30% of AI-assisted coding. I’ve seen some folks casually claim that AI can’t do what developers do, but Addy actually gives tangible examples here.

[article] 5 Pandemic-Era Lessons on Leading Through Drastic Change. It’s been five years since the US response to COVID kicked in. Did you learn any leadership lessons from that period? What to do, and not do at work? I sure did.

[blog] Protecting your APIs from OWASP’s top 10 security threats. Good post on how to specifically mitigate these security risks to your APIs.

[article] GenAI and the promise of simpler code migrations. Are migration projects the “killer app” for AI and agents? Possibly. There’s real innovation happening here. But there’s still more to it than what an agent can do.

[blog] Accelerating Large-Scale Test Migration with LLMs. Upgrade-driven migrations are one thing AI can help with, but it’s also useful for full-on tech swaps.

[blog] Most People Don’t Understand Why Go Uses Pointers Instead of References. Speaking of understanding plumbing and having expertise in your craft, learn low-level concepts like memory management and how variables are referenced.

[blog] Zen: A minimalist HTTP library for Go. You might be taking a fresh look at Go, and it’s wild to see new web frameworks still popping up. This looks fairly simple to use.

[blog] Goroutines in Go: A Practical Guide to Concurrency. Let’s keep going on Go. This new post explains Go’s very cool implementation of concurrency.

[blog] Living games are here: How gen AI is leveling up the games industry. It’s exciting to think of video games that can adapt and reconfigure with AI. Here’s how Google Cloud is helping make it happen. More here too.

[blog] LlamaIndex vs. LangChain vs. Hugging Face smolagent: A Comprehensive Comparison. Looks like a solid eval. I personally wouldn’t commit heavily to any single AI app framework right now. Too much happening with no clear sense of what will “win” out.

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