Daily Reading List – July 14, 2025 (#586)

I liked some of the advice and data in today’s reading list. Learn about taking care of yourself as a leader, generating media from agentic CLIs, embracing personal growth, and building better distributed systems.

[blog] The 2025 Docker State of Application Development Report. Tons of interesting data points in this survey. See what devs think of AI, remote dev environments, containers, and places to learn.

[article] Leading Is Emotionally Draining. Here’s How to Recover. I get that most individual contributors won’t spend a lot of time sympathizing with the challenges of leadership. But it’s no joke, and a heavy investment in leadership is more work that it appears.

[blog] Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 5 : Github MCP Server. I go hot and cold on MCP. However, this is a good example of where it’s handy for agentic CLI work.

[blog] Give Gemini CLI the Ability to Generate Images and Video, Work with GitHub Repos, and Use Other Tools. Dammit, now I’m hot again on MCP. Here’s another scenario where an MCP brings functionality to the Gemini CLI that wouldn’t have otherwise been there.

[blog] How to Shift What You Think Is Possible. Growth looks different to beginners than experts. But both need a way to rethink what’s possible.

[blog] Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity. On Friday, I linked to a paper that showed a slowdown when devs used AI tools. Simon explores this further.

[blog] The GitOps Repository Structure: Monorepo vs. Polyrepo and Best Practices. Are you a monorepo person who likes everything in one place? Or is your source code and config data distributed across many repos? Here is advice for both.

[blog] Gemini Embedding now generally available in the Gemini API. Generate embeddings with this high performing and competitively priced model.

[blog] Distributed Systems Mistakes Nobody Warns You About: Consistency. Yes. It’s easy to assume that all the related operations succeeded, but you get into a funky state when you have a a bunch of async updates and one fails.

[blog] What You Actually Need to Monitor AI Systems in Production. Good topic, and not one I’ve seen widely discussed. What should you be keeping track of at each app stage?

[article] Building Autonomous Systems: A Guide to Agentic AI Workflows. This DigitalOcean article has a fairly rich look at the use cases, patterns, and technologies around agents.

[blog] How to Teach Gemini CLI to Write Python Scripts with Inline Dependencies. I think we’re selling ourselves short on our role with these AI tools. There are so many cases where our creativity is applied to “teach” these tools to do cool things.

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