Daily Reading List – March 9, 2026 (#737)

I had a fun weekend, with no option to do anything work related. Baseball, boating, and shenanigans with family. I probably get more inspiration for things to do at work because I’m living an enjoyable life outside of it. At least that’s what I tell myself.

[blog] Designing MCP tools for agents: Lessons from building Datadog’s MCP server. Some hard-earned lessons here! There are at least 3-4 strong pieces of advice in this Datadog post.

[article] The revenge of SQL: How a 50-year-old language reinvents itself. Is SQL hot again? Is it about relational databases solving most use cases nowadays? Also you have SQL on the frontend, better SQL clients and more.

[article] EY hit 4x coding productivity by connecting AI agents to engineering standards. Better models matter. But applying a smart context is a difference maker regardless of model.

[blog] Game on with Spanner: How Playstation achieves global scale with 91% less storage, 50% lower costs. Cool story. A high performing database engine can end up saving you a ton of money and complexity.

[blog] How Do Large Companies Manage CI/CD at Scale? Me building and running a simple deployment pipeline is not “scalable CI/CD.” What do teams do when they have lots of apps, pipelines, and targets? Some insight here.

[blog] Go for Backend Development — Why We Bet on It. Very strong, defensible case for using Go.

[article] When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry.” Across roles, people are using AI past the point of their brains can handle. What leads to brain fry, and how to prevent it?

[blog] Hardware-Enabled Software and the Next Generation of Vertical AI. I don’t pay a lot of attention to this space, so this was educational.

[blog] Firebase A/B Testing is now available for the web. The functional was available to mobile devs for a while, and now web users can take advantage of this powerful system for running experiments.

[blog] Terminals Are Cool Again. Maybe we should be building more terminal apps? I’m not sold that they’re more accessible than a web or desktop app. But there’s no doubt they’re lighter weight and can be more efficient to use.

[blog] gRPC on GKE for Fun & Profit Part 1 — An Overview. gPRC is a key technology within Google, and also many other companies that care about performance between services. See part 2 of this series as well.

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