We had quite the earnings call today, and I’m proud of the work Google Cloud has done to deliver a platform people want to use. I had a mini-break from vacation this week to do customer calls, but taking Thursday and Friday to finish out my recharge week. Reading lists still part of the plan!
[blog] 260 things we announced at Google Cloud Next ’26 – a recap. That’s a lot of things. It’s a mix of product news, customer stories, and partner updates.
[blog] What Happened When We Treated AI Like an Engineering Teammate. The McDonald’s crew look at how AI sped up their engineering efforts.
[blog] Agents CLI in Agent Platform: create to production in one CLI. This is very cool, and I haven’t tried it yet. Need to change that. But using agents to create agents is interesting. Especially the help testing and deploying them. More coverage here.
[blog] Meetings are forcing functions. We all complain about meetings, but there’s a reason they exist. In some cases, the standing meeting actually forces people to do things ahead of time.
[article] Generative UI explained without the hype. I really needed this. For some reason, I just didn’t “get” generative UIs. But now I understand it much better.
[article] Managing a team that didn’t choose you. You rarely get to build an entire team or situation from scratch after taking over a leadership assignment. This post looks at how an engineering manager might handle the new circumstances.
[blog] 1,302 real-world gen AI use cases from the world’s leading organizations. Some of these are massive use cases, some more surgical. That’s fine. But get going yourself by finding inspiration from what your peers are already doing.
[article] Workday’s Last Workday? Quite the analysis! Workday has a very sticky business, but faces some real disruption for maybe the first time.
[blog] Building a PCI-DSS Compliant GKE Framework for Financial Institutions: Data Protection, Governance & Audit Logging. Meaty content here. If you’re doing PCI, this might prove to be a useful input to your evaluation agents, or human brains.
[article] Bed Bath & Beyond CEO: AI will lead to ‘significant reduction in headcount.’ The takeaway from this? Everyone should think about becoming “an organization that puts its payroll in the field.” Bloated back offices are going away.
[blog] The Industry Is Watching GPU Prices. Google Just Moved the Fight to the Judgment Layer. Probably the sharpest analysis I’ve seen from last week. Keith sees the big picture and lays it out.
[article] Roo Code pivots to cloud-based agent, says IDEs aren’t the future of coding. It’s amazing how fast the consensus shifted. Instead of GitHub at the center of the dev universe, and IDEs as the uniform front door for technologists, neither are true anymore.
[blog] Before GitHub. Armin looks at how we managed source code and packages in a pre-GitHub world. While many of us are rooting for GitHub to get back on track, it’s useful to play through scenarios where that’s not the case.
[blog] Building a production MCP server in Go. This post starts off by saying it was useful to build the MCP server in the same language as their existing backend. Many good tips here.
[blog] You can now easily generate files in Gemini. Here we go. Create PDFs, Word docs, Google Sheets, and other artifacts directly in your Gemini app session. Available to everyone, right now.
[blog] Celebrating 20 years of Google Translate: Fun facts, tips and new features to try. This is one of those magical services that we take for granted now. But it’s only getting better and connecting us even more deeply.
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