Daily Reading List – November 19, 2025 (#669)

I’m flying up to Vancouver (Canada) this evening to participate in a DevFest event. So many new things to talk about! I’m hoping for good airplane wifi so that I can do some deeper work with Google Antigravity. But I’m not getting my hopes up.

[blog] Gemini 3 Prompting: Best Practices for General Usage. Very good, specific tips from Philipp here. I’d imagine that a handful of these could apply to other models, but try them on Gemini first.

[blog] Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3. Such a great post. The reflection of how far we’ve come, and the continuous mindset shift needed, is very valuable.

[blog] App Engine scaling, simplified: Map your scaling controls to Cloud Run. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is sometimes a valid approach. But sometimes even working things should be revisited. Here’s a good post on getting your Google App Engine workloads over to Cloud Run.

[article] How to automate the testing of AI agents. There’s some good advice here on rethinking QA and how to ensure you actually have “working” agents.

[blog] Google’s 2025 Accelerator Impact Report is here. Some staggering impact here, and we’re not slowing down.

[article] Our Favorite Management Tips on Leading When You’re Overwhelmed. These are all good pieces of advice. We’ll see if I’m too stubborn to adopt some of them.

[blog] Cross Language A2A Agent Development and Testing. This still feels like “the hard way” at the moment, but it’ll get rapidly easier. The fact that you *can* do cross-platform agent coordination is still a big step forward.

[article] Shadow work in engineering teams. There’s probably some amount of work that’s always “invisible” but when it’s a majority of the work, that’s a problem. All of a sudden, everyone is over-allocated because a manager doesn’t see that capacity as already accounted for!

[blog] The Dawn of the 10x Team. This is definitely better than a 10x individual, which mostly doesn’t exist. Can the focus instead be on how to empower teams to do incredible work?

[blog] Deploy apps to Google Cloud Run. Shopify adding this to their documentation, which is cool to see.

[blog] Don’t Fear Being ODD—Embrace Observability Driven Development for Faster, Safer Innovation. I’m trying to recall if I’ve ever heard of observability-driven development. i don’t think so. The point is valid, but not sure any developer is going to think about this a TON up front.

[blog] My Foreword to “Frictionless.” This looks like a terrific book by people who know what they’re talking about.

[blog] YugabyteDB Joins Google’s MCP Toolbox for AI Agent Development. This MCP server now connects you to a full spectrum of databases and makes it easy to bring data to your agents.

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