Category: Daily Reading List

I’m refreshed (and sunburned) after a long holiday weekend. Today wasn’t as packed with meetings as usual, so it was also great to crank out a blog post (in addition to this one), empty my inbox, and take some AI training. And get to read a lot, as you’ll see below.

[article] Arriving at ‘Hello World’ in enterprise AI. Top-down selling of AI into enterprises is a tough route. You also need bottoms-up enthusiasm and wins to get real traction.

[blog] 10 Tools For Building MCP Servers. We’re going to overdo it on MCP servers, aren’t we? Seems inevitable. If you want to join the gold rush, here’s a list of frameworks that get you there faster.

[blog] Building your first AI product: A practical guide. Good insight from an engineering leader at Box who helped build their flagship generative AI product.

[blog] Vibe Coding a 5,000km Bike Race Part II: Production ready with Gemini driven development. Fantastic guidance from Esther here on taking a vibe-coded app and working through the key domains that make it production ready.

[article] Why “I’m Sorry” Are Two of the Strongest Words for Leaders. Real sorrys. Not the pretend “I’m sorry you didn’t like what I said” or “I’m sorry for that, but …” stuff.

[article] How has AI impacted engineering leadership in 2025? Good insights, although AI usage data collected in March is already woefully dated. And I wonder if we’re working off a common definition of “developer productivity.” Probably not.

[book] Agentic Design Patterns. My colleague is writing this book out in the open in a series of Google Docs. Anyone can view or offer suggestions. Terrific content!

[blog] A guide to converting ADK agents with MCP to the A2A framework. Don’t add this sort of machinery until you need it. But when you do, it’s good to know how to do it.

[article] Mastercard’s massive structured data stores drive its success with today’s AI applications. Bravo. Seems like the team at Mastercard have put in the hard work to have a great data foundation that now makes AI and ML useful at scale.

[blog] Batch Mode in the Gemini API: Process more for less. It’s async, with higher limits, lower cost, and a good fit for big jobs where results 24 hours later are fine.

[blog] Ready for Rust? Announcing the Official Google Cloud SDK for Rust. Rust has a lot of fans, and now they have easier access to a great cloud platform.

[article] Research: Executives Who Used Gen AI Made Worse Predictions. Check this out to better understand where to guard against thoughtless acceptance of AI answers.

[blog] From Prompt to Code Part 2: Inside Gemini CLI’s Memory and Tools. I like posts that show how to use features. But with open source projects, you can also show how the underlying code actually works. That’s what we have here. And part 3 which explores safety and extensibility of the Gemini CLI.

[blog] From Open Model to Agent: Deploying Qwen3 ADK agent on Vertex AI Agent Engine. Use open models in an open agent framework, and deploy to a cloud runtime. Sounds good to me.

[blog] Hear a podcast discussion about Gemini’s multimodal capabilities. There’s still so much untapped potential when you have LLMs that can understand the world around it. Great discussion between Logan and Ani.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

I’ve got a couple days off for our Independence Day holiday, so this reading list needs to hold you over until Monday. It’s a big one!

[article] Most enterprises can’t secure AI, Accenture says. “Can’t” or “haven’t”? Sounds like the former as it appears that many organizations don’t have the tech or investment to do so.

[blog] Cloud CISO Perspectives: The global threats facing EU healthcare. I know AI investments can be at the expense of security ones, but don’t neglect a robust security strategy.

[blog] How I write production-ready Spring Boot applications. Good post. My brain is now broken by AI so my first thought when reading this was “these would be good instructions to add to a GEMINI.md file.”

[blog] How AI Agents Are Changing API Rate Limit Approaches. Your network traffic, storage patterns, and yes, even API interactions will change when AI agents get going.

[article] When a PM takes over engineering. I haven’t seen this talked about much, and there’s some good advice here for those coming into engineering management from product.

[blog] Most Effective Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools. There’s going to be some implicit bias here because Pulumi is doing the assessment, but I thought this was a fair look at the overall landscape.

[blog] New Gemini tools for students and educators. This is the likely the domain where AI can be the most useful, and also the most dangerous. It’s fantastic as a learning and personalization tool. Unprecedented. It’s also made it easier to only learn how to prompt.

[blog] Agentic Coding Recommendations. Meaty set of recommendations here. We’re all learning right now, and what works for one person may not work for you. But study what folks are up to.

[blog] Turning my Resume Into an Interactive Game : ReactJs & Go. The post is ok, but the idea really struck me. What a creative way for someone to “explore” your job history.

[blog] 6 skills every engineer needs for the AI era. From the Figma team. I didn’t see anything earth-shattering, but again, keep observing what others are learning.

[blog] Is it time to switch CI/CD platforms? 7 warning signs. I’d bet that your CI/CD tech is pretty sticky. You don’t swap it out very often. But there are times when you’re past due for a refresh.

[blog] Gemini CLI: vibecode a Next.js app and push to the Cloud! Fun walkthrough that shows the usefulness of the Gemini CLI. And I’m reading this in Riccardo’s voice, which made it more enjoyable.

[article] Cursor launches a web app to manage AI coding agents. Is there a lot out there already for coordinating, visualizing, and operating agents? Not that I’ve seen.

[blog] Building Autonomous AI systems with Looping Agents from Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK). It’s common to build chains, but looping scenarios are a fascinating agent pattern.

[blog] Vibe Learning is Underrated. Worthwhile read. AI makes learning new things feel less intimidating, as we can ask “dumb questions” or go on tangents without feeling guilty.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

It was a fun day in Sunnyvale learning from the Redmonk folks. We talked about “developers” all day, and picked up some good insights. Before that, lots of reading.

[blog] Beyond the Prototype: 15 Hard-Earned Lessons to Ship Production-Ready AI Agents. Great topic. This post has some strong advice and useful checklists for those thinking of putting agents in production.

[blog] Gen AI Evaluation Service — An Overview. I’ve mentioned here a few times that building skills in evals is a good idea. Mete spends time in this post exploring one eval service for models, tools, and agents.

[article] The AI-Native Software Engineer. My colleague Addy published a super playbook on incorporating AI deeply into the software engineering discipline. We published complementary posts at almost exactly the same time today.

[article] Why attitudes and experiences differ so much with regards to AI among technical writers. Adoption and opinions of AI are all over the map. Tom spends some time thinking through the tech writer mindset.

[blog] Go should be more opinionated. The point here is about application layout and structure. I’ve definitely seen a few approaches, and not sure the language should dictate one. But, a smart default is a good idea.

[blog] Docs for AI agents. Here’s a good mishmash of thoughts about the docs agents use to plan and do their work on your codebase.

[blog] Why We Replaced Kafka with gRPC for Service Communication. Have you fallen in love with a tool/service and use it for everything? We’ve all been there. I liked this look at switching from Kafka to gRPC for many use cases.

[blog] Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 2 : Gemini CLI Command line parameters. Romin does a great job reviewing each CLI flag. Here’s how you control model choice, debug mode, sandboxing, YOLO mode, and more.

[blog] Everything I know about good system design. Patterns evolve, the tech changes, and what’s “good” doesn’t stay the same. But the items called out here represent some solid design truths.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

Spent a small bit of time this weekend playing with using agents to build agents. How meta! Today, many of our engineering leads answered Gemini CLI questions in this Reddit AMA. What a wild time for builders.

[blog] Docker State of App Dev: AI. Docker’s second annual app dev survey has some useful data points.

[blog] The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It’s Context Engineering. You’ll see this term popping up a lot now, maybe like vibe coding. It feels like an important idea.

[blog] How to Fix Your Context. Building on the previous items, how should you think smartly about creating and maintaining context used by an agent? Great post.

[blog] Go 1.25 interactive tour. These are always terrific posts. Anton publishes these assessments of Go releases by letting you test out the features right within the blog post. See his related (and interactive) look at the new JSON handling capabilities.

[blog] Using Platform Engineering to simplify the developer experience – part one. Doing platform engineering wrong is a headache. But doing it well it a major accelerator.

[article] Lessons learned from agentic AI leaders reveal critical deployment strategies for enterprises. Success metrics, infrastructure guidance, testing approaches, and more.

[article] AI Agents Are Revolutionizing the Software Development Life Cycle. It’s true. Some are realizing it sooner than others!

[blog] Audit smarter: Introducing Google Cloud’s Recommended AI Controls framework. Governance and compliance, the two buzzkills of every interesting technology movement. But done right, you can go fast and stay safe. This seems like one way to do it.

[blog] APIs Versioning. No new ground, but it’s a good topic to refresh yourself on from time to time. And a reminder for those who keep breaking APIs.

[blog] How To Overcome Negative Thoughts: 4 Secrets From Philosophy. We all experience moments of self-doubt and internal questions of our own abilities. How do you keep from spiraling?

[blog] From Prompt to Code Part 1: Inside the Gemini CLI’s Execution Engine. I haven’t seen this yet. The post isn’t just a look at what the Gemini CLI does, but actually explores the source code.

[blog] This Week in Open Source for June 27, 2025. I’m liking where this weekly update is going. It provides a broad look at the open source landscape and what’s happening.

[blog] Gemma 3n fully available in the open-source ecosystem! Hugging Face does some of the best tech blog posts in our industry. Here’s a great one that looks at this small open model.

[blog] Our latest bet on a fusion-powered future. Good bet, it seems. We’re making a notable investment here.

[article] Why Software Migrations Fail: It’s Not the Code. I imagine that AI is going to “fix” parts of this, but still a reminder that code update aren’t the only thing you need to worry about when doing a migration project.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

It’s the end of a busy week. I’m looking forward to a hopefully-quiet weekend with the family and a few good books. Take a breather too!

[article] How much does AI impact development speed? Good look at some new research into how much AI impacts developers and their pace. Interesting that seniority and prior usage didn’t change the outcome.

[blog] Veo 3: A Detailed Prompting Guide. This is absolutely fantastic. Get all the right phrases and jargon to use when prompting a text-to-video model like Veo 3. Gold!

[blog] Gemini CLI: Technical Assessment Report – AI Hacker Lab Technical Analysis. Wow, what a thorough analysis. We’re only 3 days into this product, but we’ve already shipped a few updates, and somehow became the most starred agentic CLI on GitHub.

[article] Walmart cracks enterprise AI at scale: Thousands of use cases, one framework. I liked some of the insights here, including an evolution of success metrics from funnels and conversion, to actual goal completion.

[blog] Coding agents have turned a corner. It’s fine when goofballs like me use these AI tools and offer guidance, but I really value the advice from capital-E Engineers like Brian. Here, he offers his direction on how to work with coding agents.

[blog] First steps with Gemini Code Assist agent mode. Excellent post that shows the workflow and tooling for using agents within your VS Code editor.

[blog] The rise of “context engineering.” The idea here is making sure the LLM has the right information and tools it needs to accomplish its task. It’s a system approach, versus thinking in prompts alone.

[blog] Introducing BigQuery ObjectRef: Supercharge your multimodal data and AI processing. This seems super cool and useful. Reference a binary object from within your structured tables and do single queries that can factor it all in.

[blog] The Google for Startups Gemini kit is here. Startups seem to gravitate towards Google, and we’re making it even better for them with this offering.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

Another wild day. I’m doing some research into what other people think modern, AI-driven coding looks like. May turn my findings into a blog post. Either way, a new work style is forming.

[blog] Choosing the Right Deployment Path for Your Google ADK Agents. Fantastic post from Ayo that explores three agent hosts with different value propositions. You’ll likely debate their three types of platforms, regardless of which cloud you use.

[blog] 6 ways to become a database pro with the Gemini CLI. It’s a mistake to lump these agentic CLIs into a “coding tools” bucket. You can do a lot more than code apps. Karl shows some great data-focused examples here.

[blog] What Diff Authoring Time (DAT) reveals about developer experience. What’s going on from that moment a developer makes their first edit, until a pull request gets created? How do we measure that and improve the experience? Here’s analysis of some recent research.

[blog] Making it easier to scale Kafka workloads with Cloud Run worker pools. This is extremely interesting to me. Worker pools give you continuous background processing, and this new autoscaler for Kafka pairs up perfectly with these worker pools.

[blog] Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices. Here we go. Get a powerful vision language action model running locally on your robot.

[article] How To Prepare Your API for AI Agents. If you actually have an API strategy, you’re already ahead of others. This article has some advice for what to focus on.

[blog] Introducing Gemma 3n: The developer guide. Excellent content here. It’s a comprehensive look at what’s new, and also provides tons of links for exploration.

[blog] I don’t care if my manager writes code. Should engineering managers be committing code alongside their reports? No, that doesn’t seem very wise or sustainable. But I do want my management to deeply know the tech the team is using.

[article] Enterprises must rethink IAM as AI agents outnumber humans 10 to 1. Speaking of agents, there’s a re-think of identity management coming.

[article] Replit democratizes software development with Claude on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. Anthropic added this case study to their roster, and it’s a great story of using your choice of model.

[article] Google positions itself for ‘next decade’ of AI as Gemini CLI arrives with generous free tier. We’ll see what happens, but we’re positioned well to be the best option for those building with AI.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

We’ve been building up to today’s launch of the Gemini CLI. There were some inevitable hiccups on launch day, but it’s fun to be part of teams that make things people like using. Give it a try!

[blog] Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent. This is a huge deal. Open source, free to use, lightweight, and super extensible. This is another reason I think software engineering is changing forever. Press coverage here, here, here, and here.

[blog] Getting Started with Gemini CLI. Here’s a spot-on guide for installing and flexing some of the most important parts of our powerful new tool.

[blog] How Salesforce Engineering Operationalized AI Productivity at Scale. How did Salesforce get thousands of their engineers to productively use AI? Here’s a look at their approach.

[blog] AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome. Wow. Here’s a new AI tool for predicting impact of variants and mutations in DNA.

[article] AI and Tech Jobs: More Evidence That Panic Isn’t Justified. More jobs being created than going away, but it’s still murky as to how companies are evaluating their plans.

[blog] Where should AI sit in your UI? Very cool work that explores different AI UI patterns and the benefits and limitations of each.

[blog] Do AI Code Review Tools Work, or Just Pretend? Kate does some great work here assessing the current landscape of code review tools and what developers think of them.

[article] Report Shows Overinflated Opinion of Infrastructure Automation Excellence. Many think they’re doing expert level infrastructure automation, but most don’t seem to actually doing it.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

A fun and frantic day. My kids are on Summer break, but there’s no slowdown for us working folks. That’s fine by me, as long as the work is interesting and impact is possible.

[blog] Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide. Give this a read. Ethan does another great job explain not only which AI he uses when, but how to act like a power user.

[blog] A practical guide to building Multi-Agents AI Systems with A2A. I get a lot of agent-related content in my feeds, and now a lot of agent-to-agent content. This one was solid.

[article] Google Donates the Agent2Agent Protocol to the Linux Foundation. Good writeup of yesterday’s big news.

[blog] The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2025. The big headline is that there’s no big headline. Very little movement in language usage by developers. Folks like what they like.

[blog] Seamless Tool Integration for Agents: A Deep Dive into the new Toolbox JS SDK. Maybe nobody is switching languages because the good stuff keeps coming to each one. Those building AI agents in JavaScript now have a better system for adding database-focused tools.

[article] Salesforce launches Agentforce 3 with AI agent observability and MCP support. This matters for many reasons. But a big one is that a TON of people use Salesforce, so expect to see agentic flows popping up all over.

[blog] Supercharge your notebooks: The new AI-first Google Colab is now available to everyone. Build, debug, and analyze faster. Check out this fresh experience in Colab.

[article] Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor. We all need help prioritizing, and Jason gives us a framework that should steer us towards better tasks and stronger communication about our work.

[blog] This Week in Open Source – Inaugural Post. To me, it seems like it’s been a while since an industry-shaking open source project came out from a big tech vendor. A2A is great, but still early. But there’s actually still a ton of OSS going on at Google, and I liked this recap.

[article] The AI Revolution Won’t Happen Overnight. It will not. I think the optimists (of which I am one) have predicted the right impact, but the timeline is off.

[blog] Our favorite moments from 20 years of Google Earth. Do you just take for granted that you can immediately call up nearly any place on the planet and see it in detail? I do. And that’s ridiculous. 20 years later, this is still a magic service.

[article] Tech Hiring Improves but Managers Overworked, Says Report. It’s a tricky time to be a manager, but the best ones will use this opportunity to build better systems around them.

[blog] Stop pontificating about other people losing their jobs to AI and worry about your own job. Related, I guess. Your value needs to outweigh your cost. That’s always been true. My goal is to always be a well-paid bargain to my employer.

[blog] Run your own code at the edge with Service Extensions plugins for Cloud CDN. It’s cool that we keep adding extensibility points into Google’s massive global network.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

Happy Monday. Summer is in full swing here in San Diego and we’ve somehow skipped the annual June Gloom. I’ve jinxed it, haven’t I.

[paper] What Makes a Good Natural Language Prompt? The difference between a good prompt and bad prompt is stark. Very different results! This paper looks at 21 prompting categories that determine the quality of output.

[blog] Google Cloud donates A2A to Linux Foundation. Excellent news! The major hyperscalers plus others are the founding members of this new project to advance agent-to-agent communication.

[aricle] Is All Micromanagement Bad? Here’s How the Best Startup Leaders Balance Details and Delegation. Yah, micromanagement has a bad reputation, but the opposite is much worse. Good leaders stay close to the customer and close to the work.

[article] The tough task of making AI code production-ready. The engineering workflow is changing. Are you getting ready for it, with the right skills, processes, and tools?

[blog] The Agent-as-Tool Antipattern: Analyzing Protocol Mismatches in Peer-to-Peer Multi-Agent Architectures. Right pattern for the use case? Kishore thinks that turning everything into MCP servers is a bad idea, and A2A represents a better way for agents to interact with each other.

[blog] In Praise of “Normal” Engineers. Build great teams, don’t chase 10x engineers. If you have one, great, but your throughput is dependent on the overall software team’s performance.

[article] My 2025 system prompt. John put together a legit system prompt for use in LLM chat experiences when he wants direct, focused responses.

[article] LinkedIn CEO says AI writing assistant is not as popular as expected. Good. Don’t use AI to write LinkedIn posts or replies. There’s a line for where AI should be used. That’s it.

[blog] Looker developers gain speed and accuracy with debut of Continuous Integration. That’s cool. Apply CI practices more easily to your BI dashboards and reports.

[blog] Colab Terminal Is Now Free For All Users. Long live the terminal! Now more you can do, for free, from the Colab Terminal. Add packages, do git commands, and more.

[blog] AppGen Is Here: Say Goodbye to Software Development As You Know It. Diego and John share a great perspective on where software development is heading. If you subscribe to Forrester Research, definitely read the related report.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

Yesterday was a US holiday. It’s weird having a Thursday off and then going right back to work on Friday. But, I think we all survived. Got some work done, did a Twitter thread on coding assistance, and got hands-on with some upcoming tech. Not too shabby.

[blog] How We Use AI At Pulley. Excellent look at what it means to build with AI. From tools to updated practices, there’s a lot to learn from here.

[article] MCP Needs a Security Reality Check. MCP didn’t start with a lot of mature security considerations, but they’re quickly coming around.

[blog] How to pass the Google Cloud Generative AI Leader Exam: A Study Guide. This is a new test, and it’s helpful to see how JK studied for it.

[blog] Single vs Multi-Agent System? Great piece by Philipp. There’s competing advice out there, and he spends time sharing the pros/cons of each approach.

[paper] Build the web for agents, not agents for the web. Interesting POV. This paper proposes a new interface for the web that’s specifically designed for agent consumption.

[blog] Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections. Invest in this area of knowledge and keep track of the latest thinking of how to secure our AI systems.

[article] Vibe Coding in a Post-IDE World: Why Agentic AI Is the Real Disruption. Agreed. Agentic coding will have a bigger impact than the current generation of AI assistants.

[article] Navigating the Jump from Manager to Executive. It’s not an easy jump. Here’s some guidance as you move up the chain.

[blog] Designing an AI-Native Marketing Team: A Guide for Founders . With an embedded presentation. If yesterday’s playbook doesn’t apply anymore, how do you craft the right team?

[blog] Every service should have a killswitch. Every code path doesn’t require this, but there’s definitely merit in having a way to turn off a hot operation.

[blog] Developer’s guide to getting started with Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite. This new member of the Gemini family looks solid. Here’s how to start using it.

[article] Designing Collaborative Multi-Agent Systems with the A2A Protocol. Here’s a helpful deep dive into agent collaboration, with a look at A2A and MCP.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below: