Daily Reading List – March 25, 2025 (#519)

Whew. Wild day with team offsites, Cloud Next keynote rehearsals, and some important Gemini model launches. The reading list below has its share of AI, but many other topics too!

[blog] Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model. Big release! Baked in “thinking” and some outstanding performance with coding.

[blog] Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code. Just a terrific piece from Simon that has pragmatic wisdom, and a great example of a real-world situation where LLM helped him leverage his own expertise.

[article] Valkey 8.1’s Performance Gains Disrupt In-Memory Databases. This Redis fork isn’t going away. Rather, it’s becoming a legit top-tier option for those looking for a blazing fast cache.

[blog] How to Choose the Right LLM. The JetBrains IDEs let you choose which LLM to use to help you code. This piece outlines your options.

[article] When You Oversell Your Abilities and It Backfires. We all do it at one time or another. Some of you do it hardcore on LinkedIn. How do you regain credibility once you’re found out?

[article] 20 Business terms every Engineering Manager should know. Really, really useful list. I wouldn’t have recognized most of these until halfway through my career.

[blog] Considering Data Science Users in Your API Design. I hadn’t thought about this. Yes, now that data science teams (and agent builders) will be using your APIs, what changes should you consider?

[blog] Build gen AI agents using Google Cloud databases. If you’re going to build agents, you’re going to need a strategy for interacting with data services.

[blog] Building Vertex AI RAG Engine with Gemini 2 Flash LLM. Speaking of data services, you might want an easier option for processing and caching your data. Our RAG Engine is one such option.

[blog] Interoperability Is Key to Unlocking Agentic AI’s Future. This seems right, and I liked the nine dimensions of agentic interoperability called out here.

[article] Future Self. I’ll often joke about Past Richard screwing Future Richard with bad travel choices. Find the balance between the cost you take today to help tomorrow, and not over-doing it.

[blog] Figma to Flutter: Convert designs to clean Flutter code. As much as you can use AI to build interactive, working prototypes, there’s still obviously use cases for systems like Figma. Here’s a new tool for converting those designs to Flutter widgets.

[article] Getting Started with TDD: A Practical Guide to Beginning a Lasting Practice. This is the rare piece that could have actually used the term “comprehensive guide” and been accurate.

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