Daily Reading List – April 25, 2025 (#539)

We had a good earnings call yesterday and don’t seem to be experiencing the AI slowdown that other hyperscalers are. Full speed ahead! Go into the weekend by queuing up a few of the pieces below for a deep read.

[blog] DORA’s new report: Unlock generative AI in software development. Great new report from a trusted name in the analysis of software delivery performance.

[blog] Celebrating Five Years of Backstage: From Open Source Project to Enterprise Software Business. This is an important product in the mainstreaming of platform engineering. Kudos on the achievement!

[blog] Trust will make or break AI agents. Yes, this seems like an area where you’re going to want to bet on a few trusted sources.

[blog] Achieve real-time interaction: Build with the Live API. Underrated feature here. The Live API lets you build low-latency, multimodal interactions with Gemini.

[blog] Figma’s 2025 AI report: Perspectives from designers and developers. Are designers slower than developers in adding AI to their workflows? Seems so.

[blog] Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source: CNCF’s commitment to the community. This one is wild. I know some of the folks involved, and can assume there’s another credible side to the story. Here’s what Synadia responded with.

[blog] Accelerate your data-to-insights journey with enhanced BigQuery data canvas. Speaking of design, I like the interface of this tool. It provides a useful (new?) way to explore data. It’s free to use, and now has new features and training options.

[article] Obsessing Over Onboarding for 10+ Years — The Architect of Superhuman’s Onboarding Shares His Playbook. Really good. I liked the advice here on building and scaling human-led onboarding programs.

[blog] The hidden technical debt in LLM apps. Yes, even those fancy new LLM-based apps can have tech debt. Here are a handful of areas to explore.

[article] JavaScript Framework Reality Check: What’s Actually Working. I learned some things by reading this, including “what’s different” for a handful of new frameworks.

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