Category: Daily Reading List

Happy Monday. I had a great weekend doing some final Christmas shopping and enjoying the nice weather outside. Today’s reading list is huge again, because there’s just so much to read right now.

[article] Is Your Company’s Problem Complicated? Or Complex? There’s a difference. Complex situations require a different type of leadership, as this article points out.

[article] Why Sundar Pichai never panicked. We faced a complicated situation, and Sundar did a good job leading us through.

[site] Welcome to the State of Developer Ecosystem Report 2024. The JetBrains team just published their latest survey results into what developers do, use, and want. Read through!

[blog] Rapid UI prototyping for AgentBuilder Agents with Google Mesop and Cloud Run. I learned a lot from this post. I don’t think I had seen Mesop in action, and it was useful to see how to deploy agent-driven UIs.

[blog] Google Cloud expands vulnerability detection for Artifact Registry using OSV. This is great. The OS and app package vulnerability scanning we offer uses a timely source.

[blog] State-of-the-art video and image generation with Veo 2 and Imagen 3. Not done yet! Here’s more updates, including a brand new experiment—Whisk uses images as prompts!—that you need to see. Veo 2 is mind-blowing.

[article] Open source software companies that go proprietary: A timeline. I didn’t remember all of these companies making the switch.

[blog] Building Confidence: A Case Study in How to Create Confidence Scores for GenAI Applications. In some apps, “close” isn’t good enough. The Spotify Engineering team shows how they experimented with different ways to convey confidence in Gen AI for financial apps.

[blog] Intelligible advanced SQL queries with pipe syntax. After a burst of content, I hadn’t seen much on pipe syntax in a bit. Val brings it back to the top with a good piece.

[blog] LLM Research Papers: The 2024 List. Wowza, there was a LOT of research published this year. Sebastian does a wonderful job listing out some of the most interesting papers.

[guide] Stream logs from Google Cloud to Datadog. Clouds are platforms, which means it shouldn’t be difficult to interface with its data. This new guide shows how to send logs out of Google Cloud and into Datadog Log Management.

[blog] Top AI Dev Tools for 2025. Good list. I’m fairly confident that we’ll earn a spot on these lists next year.

[article] See how Google Gemini 2.0 Flash can perform hours of business analysis in minutes. Interesting test from the gang at VentureBeat. The last six months changed how research and analysis will happen, whether everyone realizes or not.

[article] AI fatigue, leader burnout stifle enterprise enthusiasm. Maybe related. Lots of senior leaders are struggling to get on top of all this, and the workers aren’t all enthused about it.

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Google shipped a lot of tech this week. We kept it going today with Agentspace, among other things. If you’ve fallen behind on your reading/news this week, don’t feel bad. There was a lot going on!

[blog] Registration is Open for Google Cloud Next 2025. From me. We’re putting together an excellent program here, and folks from every background will enjoy this event.

[blog] Introducing Google Agentspace: Bringing AI agents and AI-powered search to enterprises. This brings Google’s internal portal experience to you. Frankly, it’s better!

[article] Scrum Sucks Because You’re Doing It Wrong. Every technology or process can be terrible if you don’t use it right. Scrum can be great if done well.

[blog] Observability in the Age of AI. Smart take from the folks at Honeycomb. How should you use AI, share your learnings, and empower your teams?

[article] Sidecar-less or Sidecars for Your Applications in Istio Service Mesh? Watch the video or read the transcript from this interesting QCon session about modern service mesh.

[blog] Google Cloud named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. This is a very mature domain, so I’d forgive you for not looking around very often. But maybe it’s time to.

[aricle] Unit Testing vs. Integration Testing: Test Automation Basics. What are approaches to integration testing and how does it differ from unit testing? This is a good overview.

[blog] Generated SDKs for Data Connect. Auto-generated SDKs based on your data structure and desired queries? I like it. Here’s more on what the Firebase team built. Also, for Flutter.

[article] ​​6 enterprise technology predictions to watch in 2025. Not bad. These are some solid predictions that enterprise IT folks will want to scan through.

[blog] Oops! 5 serious gen AI security mistakes to avoid. Strong take from our security experts. Take a look at this extended perspective before going too deep into your AI deployment.

[blog] Founder-Style Leadership. Helpful post from Marty that builds on the “founder mode” chatter from a few months back.

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Today’s back to a wider mix of content, not just me shilling for Gemini. No promises on what tomorrow brings. There are some deep reads today, so grab a warm beverage and dig in.

[blog] Infrastructure as Code + Cloud Asset Management. What is cloud asset management all about, and where does that intersect with IaC? There’s a lot of interesting possibilities here.

[blog] Why Message Queues Endure: A History. Wow, what a deeply researched piece on one of the fundamental building blocks of many distributed systems.

[blog] Developer’s guide to getting started with Gemini 2.0 Flash on Vertex AI. Great details from Erwin for those using the new SDK to interact with Gemini 2.0.

[blog] The Death of Developer Relations. Hot take. Not wrong. Our own team has evolved to more of a PLG mindset, while focusing on tangible metrics for improving the dev experience.

[blog] Android XR: The Gemini era comes to headsets and glasses. This looks super cool, and is a step beyond those early augmented experiences. SDK dev preview now available.

[blog] Cloud CISO Perspectives: Our 2025 Cybersecurity Forecast report. This is an important item to read, especially as you focus on new threats and staying offense.

[article] 4 North Star Metrics for Platform Engineering Teams. This is for measuring dev experience and productivity. It builds on existing work from DORA, SPACE, and Google research.

[article] Ruby on Rails 8.0 Released, Introduces Kamal 2 for Improved Deployments. Is RoR back? Did it ever leave? Many folks love Ruby and like this framework. Glad to see it healthy.

[article] MongoDB smashes Wall Street expectations. Devs still love this database, and the MongoDB folks are crushing it at sales. Good job!

[blog] Scaling to zero on Google Kubernetes Engine with KEDA. Scaling a workload to zero on a Kubernetes cluster? That’s something the open KEDA project is good at. Here’s how to use it with our managed Kubernetes service.

[article] 25 Hard Questions Every Founder Should Ask Themselves.This says its for founders, but most of these questions are also very applicable to any product leader.

[article] How Gen AI Affects the Value of Development Work. There’s some interesting research here, especially the rubric on how developers see “value” in their work.

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I’ll admit that today was super fun for me. Our big Gemini 2.0 set of announcements landed well and many people were taking this new technology for a spin. Much of today’s list relates to that, but I think you’ll enjoy it!

[blog] Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era. Super post that has lots of details and links for those exploring the new world of Gemini 2.0.

[blog] The next chapter of the Gemini era for developers. This is a great post that explains all the interesting Gemini 2.0 features for developers including output modalities (audio, images), native tool use, the Live API, and even our new code agent.

[youtube-video] Behind the Scenes of Gemini 2.0. I liked this video between two of our product leaders bringing AI to everyone.

[blog] Announcing the general availability of Trillium, our sixth-generation TPU. One reason we can do so much, so quickly, and at such high quality is because of our TPU chips. You can use them too! Some news coverage here.

[article] Google Previews Jules AI Agent to Automate Software Engineering Tasks. Get some multi-step lans and processes from this experimental tool.

[article] Google’s Gemini Deep Research tool is here to answer your most complicated questions. Killer feature. This, along with things like NotebookLM, are going to change how we do research.

[blog] Gemini 2.0 Flash: An outstanding multi-modal LLM with a sci-fi streaming mode. I like our demos, but I enjoy your’s more. Simon tries out the new Live API and comes away impressed.

[site] Year in Search. What did you folks search for in 2024? This fun site shows you by country and by category.

[blog] How to Fine-tune PaliGemma 2. What does it take to fine-tune a model? And one that’s good at generating images? This is a terrific walkthrough.

[blog] Using fake deadlines without driving your engineers crazy. Good post. I’ve learned how important it is to set a clear milestone, and not settle for “it’s ready when it’s ready.”

[blog] How I reduced an API call from >5 seconds to under 100ms. Sentry is publishing some hot content lately. This is a fun read on tracing performance issues. They also published a nice piece on finding and fixing missing DB indexes.

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I’m drowning you in content this week. Sorry, not sorry. There’s just a lot of interesting material getting published! Today, I read a lot about practices and suggestions for those planning the year ahead.

[paper] Understanding and Designing for Trust in AI-Powered Developer Tooling. Check this out. It’s the latest work from our Google team that focuses on developer productivity of our engineers. What have we learned about trust in AI-powered dev tooling, and what recommendations did we make?

[blog] Legacy Shmegacy. Spicy perspective from David here. Basically, he makes the point that legacy code exists because teams aren’t doing the right things to avoid it.

[blog] Toyota shifts into overdrive: Developing an AI platform for enhanced manufacturing efficiency. How does a company known for operation excellence tackle AI? This is a good story from Toyota.

[blog] Understand how your users are using Gemini for Google Cloud with Cloud Logging and Monitoring. Are folks actually using the AI-assisted coding tools you paid for? What are they asking it? We’ve turned on Cloud Logging and Monitoring for those using Gemini Code Assist.

[article] How to Write Unit Tests in Go. I learned a couple of things here. I like the use of tables (slices) to test different inputs, and it was useful to see how to export test coverage data.

[article] TDD vs. BDD: What’s the Difference? (Complete Comparison). Speaking of testing, take a look at this comparison of test-driven development and behavior-driven development.

[blog] Introducing Accelerator for Machine Learning (ML) Projects: Summarization with Gemini from Vertex AI. The fine folks at Cloudera built one of their one-click ML projects that uses Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Gemini models.

[blog] Measuring developer experience, benchmarks, and providing a theory of improvement. How are you measuring your dev experience and performance? Will explores a few ideas here, including commentary on the tools and metrics themselves.

[blog] Having a Full Backlog Is Not a Healthy Backlog. I had a colleague who used to believe that you should only have a couple of sprints worth of stories in a backlog. If you wouldn’t commit to a feature or bug in the next sprint, reject it. Maybe don’t go that extreme, but big backlogs aren’t something to brag about!

[blog] Looking back at speculative decoding. Some useful and fascinating work that dramatically reduces inference time for ML models.

[article] AI spending to grow faster than IT budgets next year, executives say. Teams are saving money elsewhere and plowing the difference into AI projects.

[blog] Efficient Parallel Reads with Cloud Spanner Data Boost. This feature offers temporary (burst) compute to analytics queries so that you don’t slow down your transactional workloads. That’s pretty awesome and helps you avoid data mart sprawl.

[article] From Aurora DSQL to Amazon Nova: Highlights of re:Invent 2024. Good recap. AWS had some fascinating announcements. That said, this year felt less buzzy, with fewer organic news stories, Hacker News posts, and other things typical of a re:Invent.

[blog] Build more for free and access more discounts online with Google Maps Platform updates. This looks like a developer-friendly evolution of our free usage limits for the Maps APIs.

[blog] Control LLM output with LangChain’s structured and Pydantic output parsers. Can you get a structured (not freeform) output from an LLM, even when using frameworks like LangChain? Yes you can.

[article] The Pages Every Developer Is Searching. This is great stuff. What are developers looking for?

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It’s December, but there seems to be no year-end slowdown in tech. Sheesh, there’s a lot going on! Scan through a super-sized reading list below.

[blog] 15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to. Wrestling with where to apply AI in your org, and where to discourage it? This was a good post with some pragmatic and thoughtful analysis.

[blog] Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip. I don’t understand all of this, but it’s hard not to be wow-ed by the rate of innovation right now. And check out the performance benchmark at the bottom of this post. Learn more about our Quantum AI lab.

[blog] Open Policy Agent in Skipper Ingress. This engineering team uses OPA to deliver authorization as a service in Kubernetes. I’m not sure I’ve seen this exact use case before.

[blog] Using PromQL in Google Cloud. It’s understandable that most platforms have a distinct dialect that you have to adapt to. But I like when platforms embrace open, portable APIs like we do here.

[article] Meta unveils a new, more efficient Llama model. Last week was an important one for open models.

[article] Evolving Your Architecture: Essential Steps and Tools for Modernization. Great talk here. Read the transcript or watch the recording to learn about how to plan, execute, and measure an architectural modernization effort.

[blog] Announcing the launch of Vanir: Open-source Security Patch Validation. This looks like a useful project for Android devs who care about security.

[blog] Registration is open for Google Cloud Next 2025. I hope you’ll join me next April at this event. We’re building a terrific program right now.

[blog] Gain Insights into AI Applications with Distributed Tracing on Google Cloud. AI app or not, it’s a good idea to capture tracing data on important apps.

[blog] Open Preference Dataset for Text-to-Image Generation by the 🤗 Community. Looking for a wide range of text-to-image prompts to use when testing models? This new Hugging Face data set looks great.

[blog] Welcome Ron Miller, our new Operating Partner and Head of Editorial, FastForward Launch Day. Here’s a new newsletter to consider subscribing to. Ron’s a seasoned tech journalist, and this effort to help IT leaders with tech strategy is a useful one.

[blog] Test like a developer, develop like a tester. Nice post. Here’s a deeper look at how each of these key roles can better represent the other.

[docs] Infrastructure for a RAG-capable generative AI application using Vertex AI and Vector Search. Whether you’re using Google Cloud or not, you’ll find this architecture guide helpful. It’s for those building out scalable, secure infrastructure for retrieval augmented generation in AI apps.

[blog] Cloud Wars CEO of the Year Is Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian. There were many examples of great tech leadership in 2024. I see Thomas firsthand, so this seems well deserved.

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Big reading list today. I closed out a lot of my backlog of work, and reading. Enjoy your weekend!

[blog] Looking back at the first year of the Gemini era. It’s hard for me to believe that our flagship model(s) are only a year old. And at least as of today, the best option out there.

[article] VMware makes Workstation and Fusion free for everyone. Doesn’t matter if it’s for educational, commercial, or personal use. Now you can use this desktop hypervisor for free. There’s no support ticketing or troubleshooting offered, however.

[blog] The slow death of the hands-on engineering manager. I like this post. Don’t fall into the trap of giving up your tech chops just because you now manage/lead others.

[blog] GitLab CI Runners Rearchitecture From Nomad to Kubernetes. This is a modernization effort from the engineers at Seatgeek.

[blog] How to Be Resilient. Are you able to make forward progress, even when things get in the way? Difficulty is inevitable, and this post helps us think about how to keep moving.

[blog] Control your Generative AI costs with the Vertex API’s context caching. If you’re going to be interrogating a big chunk of data using an LLM, concepts like context caching will save you money.

[blog] Avoiding a Legacy Codebase. Keep it Evergreen. If you treat your code as an asset that needs constant care and feeding—as opposed to a ship and move-on mindset—it’s possible to keep it clean. Not easy though!

[blog] Moloco: 10x faster model training times with TPUs on Google Kubernetes Engine. Smart folks choose cloud when they want to scale and focus on things other than infrastructure management.

[blog] How Current leveraged Spanner to build a resilient platform for banking services. Same point. Instead of self-hosting, Current uses Spanner now and sees better resilience and perf.

[blog] The State Of Business Buying: Companies Still Struggle To Meet Buyer Expectations. Sheesh, these numbers are terrible. 87% of buyers are dissatisfied with who they chose after a purchasing process? Yikes.

[blog] Build agentic RAG on Google Cloud databases with LlamaIndex. Developers should have lots of integrations available when using a mainstream AI app building framework.

[blog] Ask the Community: What Do You Do When You Inherit a Giant Product Backlog? Great topic. What’s your response when you inherit a bunch of features and bugs from a predecessor?

[blog] How good are LLMs at fixing their mistakes? Cool stuff on the Hugging Face blog. To make it easier to understand, I fed it to Google Illuminate and made a podcast out of it.

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Flying home after a busy, inspiring week. I think you’ll enjoy a few of the items I came across today.

[blog] Semantic code search for Programming Idioms with LangChain4j and Vertex AI embedding models. Neat example of using AI to do a better search through code.

[article] DIY Kubernetes Is a Recipe for Mayhem. I don’t know. Maybe. You can certainly be successful running Kubernetes yourself, or in a single cloud. But there’s definitely value in having aspects of management centralized.

[article] How do protected blocks of time improve engineering outcomes? You get better results from engineers, and likely anyone, when you proactively block calendar spots for deep work.

[blog] Introducing PaliGemma 2: Powerful Vision-Language Models, Simple Fine-Tuning. This is a nice update to this open model. The Hugging Face post might be even better.

[blog] Kubernetes configuration linting tools. There’s no shortage of option for validating your Kubernetes config before they get applied to a cluster. Brian takes a look at the landscape.

[blog] Tech on the Toilet: Driving Software Excellence, One Bathroom Break at a Time. These one-pagers are a mainstay at the Google campuses, and you get a bit of a history lesson here.

[article] Rediscover the Joy of Early Web Development With XSLT. Goodness, I had flashbacks reading this. The amount of XSLT and XPath I’ve written is staggering. But I also haven’t touched it in 10+ years, so this was a fun reminder.

[article] OpenAI confirms new $200 monthly subscription, ChatGPT Pro, which includes its o1 reasoning model. OpenAI is looking for the spotlight as competitors challenge them from all angles. They’ve got some great folks over there, so expect some cool offerings.

[blog] ¡Hola Mexico! Google Cloud region in Querétaro now open. Excellent, glad to see our regional expansion continues south of the border.

[blog] How Eventbrite Is Scaling Development with a Distributed Frontend Architecture. Facing delivery slowdowns because of a monolithic frontend? Check this out from Eventbrite on how they did a “vertical split frontend model.”

[blog] Introducing Interactive Chat. This is a cool feature in our experimental dev environment. Use this supercharged IDE (for free) with some useful AI interactivity.

[article] Nervous About Public Speaking? Here’s How to Use Notes Like a Pro. Even if you hate public speaking, avoid using a script. This article discusses how to use short notes instead.

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Another good work day, and it’s been an exciting week for the tech industry. Lots of events, announcements, and progress in key areas.

[article] 10 Ways to Supercharge Your Career. I liked the advice here. While many of us aren’t following a planned career path, there are ways to be intentional about what we do.

[blog] Listen to your first-ever 2024 Spotify Wrapped AI podcast, built with NotebookLM. What a terrific use of this technology! Get a lively audio summary of your listening habits.

[blog] Top 10 Rules of Continuous Integration. You may be doing all of this, which is excellent. If not, today’s a great day to start.

[blog] Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model. This blew my mind. Create an explorable world from a single image? That’s remarkable.

[article] Behind the platform: the journey to create the LinkedIn GenAI application tech stack. Some good details from LinkedIn engineers in this post about their generative AI stack for developers.

[blog] Svelte vs Vue.js: Compare to Make the Right Choice. Here’s a useful comparison of two popular, lightweight frontend frameworks.

[blog] Open Models on Vertex AI with Hugging Face: Custom handlers. What happens if you want AI inference using something like Hugging Face Deep Learning Containers, but have custom input/output needs? Ivan shows off the custom handlers capability.

[article] Vercel’s V0 AI: The Easiest Way to Build Web Apps. Using English as your programming language is still wild to me. Is low-code going to be a thing when compared to services like this?

[blog] New Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities include generating documentation, code reviews, and unit tests. The AWS event is in full swing, and they’ve announced some cool things. Also check out news about Amazon Q Business, Sagemaker, new foundation model Nova, Amazon S3 Tables, Aurora DSQL, and other top announcements.

[blog] The Cloud Container Iceberg. Pulumi offers up a good post on the various ways containers show up. In some cases, it’s the center of the service. In others, it’s an implementation detail.

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I attended an exec offsite today for Google Cloud folks and heard about some of our future plans. Wow. I’m constantly blown away by our creative and useful applications of technology.

[blog] Veo and Imagen 3: Announcing new video and image generation models on Vertex AI. I’m easily impressed, but even the most cynical person will be impressed by this text-to-video and text-to-image capability.

[article] Capital One finds data disconnect between IT and business leaders. The data management strategy at many companies isn’t as good as execs think it is!

[blog] If Not React, Then What? This was easily the most interesting thing I read today. Wow. Lots of assertive opinions, but also a thorough look at why frameworkism (choosing massive frontend frameworks) is an engineering anti-pattern.

[article] Why Startups Can’t Afford ‘Free’ Open Source Testing. There’s “free as in beer” and “free as in puppies” and most software (including testing software) is the latter. You may not pay for the item, but there’s a total cost of ownership.

[article] Why microservices might be finished as monoliths return with a vengeance. There’s no data offered to suggest people are actually making major changes to architectural choices, but there’s valid points here on why folks struggle with microservices.

[blog] Deploying LlamaIndex Workflows to Cloud Run with Llama Deploy. Here’s a good look at popular framework for building generative AI apps, and how to deploy the app to the cloud.

[article] Meta is reportedly planning a $10 billion, globe-spanning subsea internet cable. All the cool people are doing subsea cables.

[article] About 10% of developers ‘do virtually nothing’. Code commits aren’t the right measure, but this could still be accurate. My question is whether that number is high or low compared to other roles in tech, and elsewhere.

[article] Why Now Is the Time to Migrate From Redis to Valkey. The case made here is ok, but only really focuses on the fully open source license. There needs to be a more compelling argument for folks to move, IMHO.

[blog] What is Valkey? This is actually a new post from the Redis team. They take a fairly balanced look at what Valkey is about, while also reminding folks of why Redis is great.

[article] So You Want to Be a Product Manager. When I took my first PM job a decade+ ago, I finally felt like I had a career path. What a fun job. Here’s more about it.

[article] The Real Way To Pitch Platform Engineering to Execs. The first question to ask yourself is “do we actually need this?” In some orgs, it makes no sense to do platform engineering. But if it does, focusing on these benefits is a good deal.

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