It was a good day of starting up my weekly (internal) newsletter for the year, catching up on doc reviews and email requests, and scoping out some coding projects for the weekend.
[article] Are You Checked Out at Work? I like that this article isn’t about why you’re checked out. It’s about how to get yourself re-engaged.
[article] Tech Outage. I’m with Bob here. It’s easy to throw screens at our kids, especially in public settings. But we’re better off resisting the urge. I’m taking my kids out for dinner tonight, and they bring coloring books and action figures for us to play with.
[blog] How to work with open source formats on BigQuery. A good data warehouse will play with a variety of data and table formats. I thought this was a good look at what the means in practice.
My day started at 2:30am when I got up to deliver a presentation to a company in Spain. I couldn’t fall back asleep after, so Google got some bonus hours of work out of me today. In today’s reading list, you’ll find some smart content on strategy and getting better results from AI models.
[article] Refining strategy with Wardley Mapping. I’ve tried to get into this, and never could. Probably not smart enough. But, some folks swear by this technique of understanding your strategic landscape.
[blog] A Good Life is Active not Passive. Important point by Brad here, and one that we should all take to heart as we resist becoming passive consumers of entertainment.
[blog] The Last Strategy Framework You’ll Ever Need. There are plenty of frameworks for strategic planning (see the the first entry in my reading list today!). John explains a few of them, and explains why strategy is hard work.
[blog] Evaluating RAG pipelines. Did you follow the previous entry here and create a RAG pipeline? Cool. How do you evaluate whether it’s the most effective combination and overall system? Mete helps you identify success measurements.
[blog] Announcing Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers. I didn’t know the scale, effort, or cost of supporting a project like Chromium. Now I do, and am glad to see more folks pitching into this browser.
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There are still plenty of “what’s coming in 2025” pieces coming out, and I’ll continue including the ones that catch my eye.
[article] Agents. You want eight thousand words about AI agents? Today’s your lucky day. Chip wrote a fantastic piece that goes into helpful depth on the topic.
[article] Explore vs Execute. Great essay from Jason here. What happens after you have the “fit” for a given product? What does an operational switch look like?
[youtube-video] The amazing, but unsettling future of technology… Entertaining video, as always from this source. But also a good overview of the hot tech (AI, agents, AR/VR, robotics, etc) and questions surrounding them.
Today’s reading list happens to have a lot of good material for those planning ahead. How do you avoid overcommitting? Or do a competitive analysis? Refine a strategy? Create OKRs?
[blog] How I built an agent with Pydantic AI and Google Gemini. Karl might have just saved you a few million dollars in consultant fees! He built a SWOT analysis tool using a variety of technologies (including the Gemini API).
[blog] Open Source Discussion Archetypes. You may not personally care about the OSS licensing fracas that’s going on, but somebody does. Steve looks at the groups that are intentionally or unintentionally invested.
[article] My 2025 trends predictions. Tom’s a tech writer at Google, and shares some useful thoughts on AI and how it’s going to impact his field.
[blog] How to effectively refine engineering strategy. Are you doing big strategic exercises, or doing small refinements until a strategy is “ready” for mass deployment? Will has a good post that can help you understand the problems being solved, and which tools to use.
[article] Meta is ditching third-party fact checkers. Good. However well intentioned, centralized moderators inevitably apply unhelpful bias. Community Notes is a useful approach.
[page] 2024 AI timeline. This is a cool way to view all the major LLM releases from last year. It shows both open and AI only (closed) models.
[article] Why You’re Chronically Overcommitted. This will probably resonate with most of you. I’ve fought back against this over the past few years to good effect.
[article] Google maps the future of AI agents: Five lessons for businesses. Are you clear on what agents are, and what you should be doing with them? I’m not sure I am, so you’re better off than me. But this VentureBeat story looks at a recent paper and offers direction.
[blog] Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job. OKRs (or however you’re capturing major goals) are for special focus, not the day to day work.
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Happy New Year! I’m back with the first edition of the Reading List for 2025. I trust you took some time over this holiday break to recharge. Let’s have some fun together this year.
[article] Our Favorite Management Tips of 2024. Very good categories here, including leadership skills to develop, building executive presence, writing skills, and asking smarter questions.
[blog] Cognitive load is what matters. Excellent post that we should all take to heart. What are we doing to reduce the extraneous, unnecessary cognitive load on our peers or customers?
[blog] Go Developer Survey 2024 H2 Results. Check out the results from 4000+ Go developers. You’ll find good insights into how they’re using AI, challenges within teams, and more.
[blog] The 12 Anti-factors of Infrastructure as Code. You might be doing some of these practices and thinking you’re following the best ideas. Brian pushes back on some mainstream practices.
[blog] The PyTorch developer’s guide to JAX fundamentals. If you love PyTorch, use PyTorch. If you’re intrigued by the performance and ecosystem of JAX, this post will help you map some of the familiar concepts.
[blog] Open ML News – Holidays Edition. My daily summaries are often fed by other people’s aggregated summaries. Omar recaps some of the most interesting open model news.
I might have learned more in 2024 than any previous year of my life. I learned so much about parenting, friendship, leadership, technology, myself, and the world around me. Some were hard lessons, others easy, but all useful.
For the seventeenth straight year, I’m writing up a recap of annual highlights, including recaps of the few dozen books I finished.
Things I Wrote (or Said)
I maintained my daily reading list, with 226 entries in 2024. I’ll plan on keeping it up in 2025, as it’s proving useful in helping me stay up to date on what matters and I like sharing what I learn.
In 2024, I also had the pleasure of co-writing and co-delivering the Google Cloud Next developer keynote.
At the start of 2024, I took over writing the weekly “Overwhelmed Person’s Guide to Google Cloud” newsletter which goes to hundreds of thousands of folks each week before being posted on our blog. This year, I may bring in more guest editors to share the load!
For the past four years, I’ve also written a weekly internal Google Cloud newsletter. This year I added another 69,000 words over 40+ editions.
In terms of public blog posts, these were a few I was particularly pleased with:
I finished 43 books last year, across a wide range of topics. The items I choose come from recommendations, references in other books I read, or even just randomly browsing the Kindle store. Here are some of my favorites.
The Eighth Wonder of the World: The True Story of André the Giant by Bertrand Hébert and Pat Laprade. Andre the Giant had a wild life. I loved watching wrestling as a kid, and knew him as a baddie. This book offered up a wonderful look at his life and impact. Seemed like a sweet guy!
Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroadby Stephen E. Ambrose. Surprisingly, this was one of my favorite books of the year. I accompanied my daughter on a field trip to Sacramento to learn more about early California. That resulted in me picking up this book. Maybe the greatest achievement of the 19th century? Amazing work.
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Doby Tom Vanderbilt. We spend a lot of time in our cars. It’s the most complex thing most of us do every day, without realizing it. This book explores some of the psychology of driving, along with lots of fun examples from around the world.
Genghis: Bones of the Hills: A Novel (Conqueror series Book 3) by Conn Iggulden. The first three books in this series were outstanding. I’m still hooked on historical fiction, and this one gives a page-turning look at the Mongol army of Genghis Khan.
Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Vol. 1)by Ian W. Toll. Someone recommended this series to me after last year’s annual recap. i’m glad they did. SO GOOD. This was some of the best content on the Pacific front of WW II I’ve ever read. This period covers Pearl Harbor through Midway. Engaging and informative.
The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 (Vol. 2) by Ian W. Toll. Here’s the second one in the series which picked up as the Allies fought the Japanese island-by-island. This was just as compelling as the first. I’ve already started reading the 3rd and final book in the series.
Quarterdeck by Julian Stockwin. I’ve kept up with this series of books about seafaring in the 19th century. This was another good one, and I enjoy the characters, the locations, and the rich plots. I also recognize that I would have someone died four minutes into one of these journeys.
The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester. Wow, I actually didn’t realize this was historical fiction until I was a quarter of the way into the book. What a tense, enjoyable read about a convoy of ships trying to cross the Atlantic while avoiding U-Boats.
The Princess Bride by William Goldman. You know the movie. Have you read the book? I had not. You won’t be disappointed. It differs slightly from the movie, but the characters are all there, and the story itself is well told.
The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road by Finn Murphy. I’ve often thought that “mover” would be the worst job I could have. All that work, and then you don’t get to enjoy it? No thanks. But I changed my mind after reading this. Murphy talks about long-haul trucking and his life moving people around the country. Great read.
150 Most Famous Poems by Poetry House. I didn’t read a lot of poetry in school. So, I figured I should get all cultured and invest some time. This book featured poems by many of the greats, and I’m better for having read it.
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron. Many of us are still in continuous-learning mode, so I’m not going to resign myself to superficial knowledge of key topics. This book was dense with a lot of math, but it also helped me understand some fundamentals about machine learning that will make me more dangerous now.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance. These next four books are all about different starting points. Vance did something “ordinary”—graduating school, going to college, getting a professional job—which was an accomplishment in itself given kids like him. Inspiring story.
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams by Darcy Frey. This book is thirty years old, and follows three New York kids in their senior year as they hope to escape Coney Island and get four-year scholarships to college. Each of these kids faced tough circumstances and long odds.
Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America’s First Female Tycoon by Charles Slack. What a story. Hetty Green was financially “set” as soon as she was born, but took what she had and made something remarkable with it. She was an eccentric person who lived life on her own terms while becoming a bigtime player in the all-male world of finance in the late 1800s.
Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win by April Dunford. The best business-y book I read this year. Dunford does a fantastic job explaining what a good sales pitch looks like, and how to properly guide buyers to where they want to go.
Widow’s Walk (Spenser Book 29) by Robert B. Parker. Here’s another series I can’t stop reading. Spenser is my favorite gumshoe, and I’ve enjoyed each one of these tales. If you like fast-paced crime novels, check these out.
The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine by A. W. Tozer. I’ve heard of Tozer, but had never read any of his books. I corrected that mistake this year. Wow. He’s a powerful writer. This is a short-ish, but wonderful read about longing for God and hearing from Him.
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. Maybe my favorite movie as a kid? I picked up the book, and was … surprised. The movie is the first half of the book, and even then, not the exact same. And the second half of the book was something else entirely. All very good and entertaining, but unexpected!
Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times by Rebecca Homkes. My second favorite business-y book? Instead of looking at uncertainty and change as negatives, Homkes encourages us to rethink our approach to strategy and execution. This “survive, reset, thrive” model is one I’ll refer back to.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Damien Lewis. A contender for my favorite book of the year. I saw the movie, which factored in just one of the stories from this book. The accounts of this WW2 band of raiders are exciting, courageous, reckless, and improbable.
That’s a wrap on 2024 for me. I cleared out the reading queue, which should hold you over for a few days. I’ll keep reading things and occasionally posting on X/Twitter, but I’m generally taking off the next two weeks. See you back on the Reading List on January 6th, and THANK YOU for reading.
[blog] Spanner in 2024: A year of innovation. Spanner might be the best database in the cloud, and with its multi-model nature, you can now do so much—full text search! vector search! graph!—at once.
[blog] What just happened. Many of us are asking the same question. December was a breakthrough month in AI with the entire landscape shifting. We shipped an absolute ton.
[blog] December in LLMs has been a lot. It has. Across a wide range of dimensions, AI looks drastically different in the market than just a few months ago.
[blog] AlloyDB Omni and local models on GKE. Great walkthrough of co-locating a model and a database in the same Kubernetes cluster, without sacrificing much.
[article] Comparing PyTorch and JAX. Both are great. JAX has a lot of fans, and many more added themselves to the list in 2024. Learn more about both here.
[blog] Ends & Means. Bob explores this “ends justify the means” philosophy, and reminds us to consider if our well-intentioned means are actually causing bad outcomes.
We had another AI surprise in store today with the new Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model. It’s very cool to see the model’s reasoning front and center. Next year, I don’t see how (or why) you’d avoid putting AI into your personal workflow. I even wrote a post today about it!
[article] InfoQ Java Trends Report – December 2024. Python and JavaScript get the accolades, but Java remains a lowkey hero in this space. It’s widely used and consistently improved.
[blog] Apigee API hub is now generally available. This API leader has been around a while, yet it stays on top in analyst ratings! This looks like a valuable new capability to centralize your APIs.
[article] Quantum Error Correction Update 2024. Do you understand what quantum computers really do? I do not. But I understand more after reading this.
[blog] Applying a Cloud Deploy Policy to an Existing Pipeline. I like this feature. If you have an existing pipeline for shipping your code, you can apply these policies—such as not deploying updates during peak hours—without changing the pipeline itself.
You don’t have to use generative AI. It’s possible to avoid it and continue doing whatever you’ve been doing, the way you’ve been doing it. I don’t believe that sentence will be true in twelve months. Not because you’ll have to use it—although in some cases it may be unavoidable—but because you’ll want to use it. I thought about how my work will change next year.
#1. I’ll start most efforts by asking “can AI help with this?”
Do I need to understand a new market or product area? Analyze a pile of data? Schedule a complex series of meetings? Quickly generate a sample app for a customer demo? Review a blog post a teammate wrote? In most cases, AI can give me an assist. I want to change my mental model to first figure out if there’s a smarter (Ai-assisted) way to do something.
That said, it’s about “can AI help me” versus “can AI do all my work.” I don’t want to end up in this situation.
Whether planning a strategy or a vacation, there’s a lot of time spent researching. That’s ok, as you often uncover intriguing new tangents while exploring the internet.
AI can still improve the process. A lot. I find myself using the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, and NotebookLM to understand complex ideas. Gemini Deep Research is almost unbelievable. Give it a prompt, it scours the web for dozens or hundreds of sources, and then compiles a report.
What an amazing way to start or validate research efforts. Have an existing pile of content—might be annual reports, whitepapers, design docs, or academic material—that you need to make sense of? NotebookLM is pretty amazing, and should change how all of us ask questions of research material.
And then with coding assistance tools, I also am getting more and more comfortable staying in my IDE to get help on things I don’t yet know. Here, my Gemini Code Assist extension is helping me learn how to fix my poorly-secured Java code.
Finally, I’m quite intrigued by how the new Gemini 2.0 Multimodal Live API will help me in the moment. By sharing my screen with the model, I can get realtime help into whatever I’m struggling with. Wow.
My day job is to lead a sizable team at Google Cloud and help everyone do their best work. I still like to code, though!
it’s already happening, but next year I expect to code more than in years past. Why? Because AI is making easier and more fun. Whether using an IDE assistant, or a completely different type of IDE like Cursor, it’s never been simpler to build legit software. We all can go from idea to reality so quickly now.
Stop endlessly debating ideas, and just test them out quickly! Using lowcode platforms or AI assisted coding tools, you can get working prototypes in no time.
#5. I will ask better questions.
I’ve slowly learned that the best leaders simply ask better questions. AI can help us a few ways here. First, there are “thinking” models that show you a chain of thought that might inspire your own questions.
LLMs are awesome at giving answers, but they’re also pretty great at crafting questions. Look at this. I uploaded a set of (fake) product bugs and asked the Gemini model to help me come up with clarifying questions to ask the engineers. Good list!
And how about this. Google Cloud BigQuery has an excellent feature called Data Insights which generates a bunch of candidate questions for a given dataset (here, the Google Cloud Release Notes). What a great way to get some smart, starter questions to consider!
#6. I want to identify where the manual struggle is actually the point.
I don’t want AI to do everything for me. There are cases where the human struggle is where the enjoyment comes from. Learning how to do something. Fumbling with techniques. Building up knowledge or strength. I don’t want a shortcut. I want deep learning.
I’m going to keep doing my daily reading list by hand. No automation allowed, as it forces me to really get a deeper grasp on what’s going on in our industry. I’m not using AI to write newsletters, as I want to keep working on the writing craft myself.
This mass integration of AI into services and experiences is great. It also forces us to stop and decide where we intentionally want to avoid it!
#7. I should create certain types of content much faster.
There’s no excuse to labor over document templates or images in presentations anymore. No more scouring the web for the perfect picture.
I use Gemini in Google Slides all the time now. This is the way I add visuals to presentations and it saves me hours of time.
But videos too? I’m only starting to consider how to use remarkable technology like Veo 2. I’m using it now, and it’s blowing my mind. It’ll likely impact what I produce next year.
That’s what most of this is all about. I don’t want to do less work; I want to do better work. Even with all this AI and automation, I expect I’ll be working the same number of hours next year. But I’ll be happier with how I’m spending those hours: learning, talking to humans, investing in others. Less time writing boilerplate code, breaking flow state to get answers, or even executing mindlessly repetitive tasks in the browser.
There’s a lot of programming language content today. I’ve got something for fans of Go, JavaScript, and Java. And still stuff for those who don’t code at all right now!
[blog] Detecting objects with Gemini 2.0 and LangChain4j. Guillaume tries out a new model version to see if it does a task better than an old version. This makes me think that if you don’t have a ongoing (not bursty, project style) team doing regular evals of new AI capabilities, you’re going to miss out.
[blog] Go Protobuf: The new Opaque API. This post stayed on the front page of Hacker News for a couple of days, with some spirited discussion. The motivation for this new API is spelled out in the post.
[site] 2024 State of JavaScript. I don’t think I’ve seen survey results like this before. Both the types of details (which array features you use) or the way it’s presented. Neat. Just jarring.
[blog] Java in the Small. Java isn’t a tiny scripting language, but it’s also not as heavyweight as it used to be. Read this to reset your expectations.
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Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 