Daily Reading List – August 25, 2025 (#614)

Tonight I’m attending an in-person draft for the Fantasy Football league I’m in. I asked Gemini Deep Research for a draft strategy given the parameters of the league, so this may be how I’ll know if we’ve achieved AGI or not.

[article] The Number One Productivity Killer for Devs? Finding Information! Some dire findings here. Developers can’t seem to find what they’re looking for, even though AI tools are saving them 10 hours a week. And, the mismatch with executive expectations continues.

[blog] NotebookLM’s Video Overviews are now available in 80 languages. Assuming that devs (or anyone) can find the source material, tools like this make it much faster to make sense of it.

[article] Timeouts, Retries and Idempotency In Distributed Systems. These are key fundamentals to understand if you’re building a distributed system, or asking an AI agent to do so.

[blog] Google Cloud Security Command Center: Your Centralized Security Nexus. I think every cloud has some sort of centralized security system. Ours is SCC, and it’s a comprehensive tool. This is a good overview.

[article] Does AI spell the death of front-end engineering? Death? No. But I do wonder about the impact now that it’s much simpler for a backend/fullstack engineer to craft functional frontends with AI.

[article] Outdated Python Versions Cost Companies Millions. Even if you don’t care about the features in a new version of your programming language, you’re likely missing out on key performance updates that can save you real money.

[blog] A Developer’s Guide to Model Routing. Learn why model routing is important, and then see a good example of building your own lightweight router.

[article] Why getting to bug zero is so hard. It’s not so simple to get rid of all the bugs in your issue list. Tom looks at a spectrum of bugs and how to tackle them.

[blog] The Story of Valkey. It’s an interesting story, and one that’s showing surprising staying power.

[blog] Gemini CLI Observability with OpenTelemetry. Cool post. I didn’t know about (or, forgot about) the OpenTelemetry support for our agentic CLI. I’d imagine that getting metrics about token and tool use could be very important.

[article] Our Favorite Management Tips on Leading Effective Meetings. Solid list that’s worth reviewing if you need to refresh your meeting strategy.

[blog] Build vs Buy in the Age of AI. I liked the perspectives here on “user programming tools” and why business software won’t get replaced by vibe-coded alternatives, but big changes are still coming.

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