Daily Reading List – July 23, 2025 (#593)

Today was fun and tiring with a mix of leadership offsite meetings and stepping in for a sick colleague to present at a large group meeting. It was nice to end that meeting and see Alphabet’s great quarterly earnings.

[article] Alphabet’s Q2 revenue beats estimates as cloud computing surges. Heckuva quarter. The business is solid, and our cloud organization is accelerating. Here are the CEO remarks, including excitement about serving OpenAI as a customer.

[article] How CEOs Hone and Harness Their Intuition. I’ve seen some people and teams hide behind data because they didn’t trust their intuition. Here’s how to build it up.

[blog] Should You Market Your API with an MCP Server? If your API is your product, why do you need an MCP server? Adam does a good job explaining when it makes sense.

[blog] Goals Take Practice. If you’re naturally good at setting goals, congrats. John looks at the many types of goals, and why practice is needed to get good at them.

[blog] Building an AI-Powered Podcast Generator with Gemini and Cloud Run. Neat example that others can follow to get customized and generated podcasts.

[blog] How I Prioritize OSS Bugs. How an OSS maintainer prioritizes bugs could be different than how you do for a commercial or internal product, but maybe not.

[blog] Context Engineering for AI Agents: Lessons from Building Manus.It’s an emerging discipline, but advice like this will help you advance your thinking on context engineering.

[blog] Debugging the One-in-a-Million Failure: Migrating Pinterest’s Search Infrastructure to Kubernetes. These “we had a problem and here’s how we investigated it” posts are always a fun read to me. The Pinterest team chased down an issue that was affected a small subset of users, but posed a risk.

[blog] Why I’m Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them). This is a pragmatic look at what can go wrong with agents (correctness at scale, cost, etc) and worth a read.

[blog] Stop Leaked Credentials in Their Tracks with Veles, Our New Open-Source Secret Scanner. Very valuable capability. Keep yourself safe, even as we ship more software.

[blog] Code review in the AI age. Are we shipping faster with AI, or shifting our time from coding to reviewing? Whichever it is, the practice of code review is as important as ever.

[blog] The evolution of code review practices in the world of AI. This post looks at how AI augments, instead of replaces, human code reviews.

[article] How Does AI Disrupt Accountability in Code Reviews? Another post on code reviews that highlights the human factor and the team accountability that code reviews encourage.

[blog] The Dataproc advantage: Advanced Spark features that will transform your analytics and AI. DIY Spark versus a managed service is a choice. We’re trying to make it harder for you 🙂

[article] Spring AI 1.0 Delivers Easy AI Systems and Services. I liked this intro from Josh into the world of Spring AI for Java app builders.

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