Daily Reading List – May 15, 2025 (#553)

I’m getting ready for Google I/O next week, and excited to deliver the “what’s new in cloud” talk. It’s probably the most preparation I ever do for a talk, as it’s tricky speaking authoritatively about dozens of distinct things across an entire cloud portfolio. Livestream is available if you want to watch me fumble through it!

[blog] Deeper insights into retrieval augmented generation: The role of sufficient context. This is very interesting research, and I really like that it’s already in use within a commercial product.

[blog] What does a Technical Lead do? Good post. Do you call these people architects? Something else? Either way, I like this effort to classify the work.

[blog] Google ADK + Vertex AI Live API. I’m happy when curious folks solve problems before solutions are well-documented. Here, Sascha integrates our Agent Development Kit with the amazing Gemini Live API, even though we haven’t really showed folks how to do it yet!

[blog] Leveraging Change Data Capture For Database Migrations At Scale. Good story of the considerations and choices for doing a database migration with little to no downtime.

[article] How Google is accelerating code migrations with AI. Here is analysis of a new paper from Google about a large scale migration we just finished up.

[blog] Platform Engineering: Evolution or Rebranding? Bit of both, depending on where you look. For some, it’s just a change in job title. But that misses the continued progress towards treating ops like a software engineering challenge.

[article] Thoughtworks CTO: AI Means We Need Developers More Than Ever. Good discussion. Although for some reason, I notice in this swell of articles related to “developer roles with AI” a bit of coping and protectionism. Probably just me.

[blog] AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms. This is very cool, and already making a measurable impact on infrastructure, data centers, and ML training.

[blog] Introducing Cassandra-compatible APIs in Spanner for zero-code-change migration. This looks handy for folks moving from self-managed databases to managed ones.

[blog] Understanding A2A — The Protocol for Agent Collaboration. With Microsoft on board and others on the way, this protocol started by Google is worth understanding better.

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