Category: Daily Reading List

Starting with mainframes, ending with AI apps. Sounds about right for 2024. I’ve got a big reading list for you today, as I was able to consume a good amount of content today.

[article] Tech leaders struggle to rescue data trapped in mainframes. Twice last week during in-person customer briefings, I mentioned mainframes and caught knowing looks between audience members. Folks are hungry for ways to effectively tap into what’s there.

[blog] 8 expert tips for getting started with NotebookLM. I haven’t formed any habits around this product yet, but I suspect that this amazing service is going to become part of the daily workflow for MANY folks in the months ahead.

[article] AI Agents: A Comprehensive Introduction for Developers. It’s not easy to find two people with the same definition of “AI agent.” Jani takes a stab and explains how to use agents. Whatever they are, Gartner Research says 2025 is a big year for agents.

[article] Microsoft unveils new autonomous AI agents in advance of competing Salesforce rollout. Whatever agents are, Microsoft is launching them for Dynamics 365 products. More here.

[blog] Open Models on Vertex AI with Hugging Face: Let’s get started! Ivan documents the “why” and “how” of getting open models running on Google Cloud’s AI platform.

[blog] Introducing Express v5: A New Era for Node.js Framework. Out of familiarity, Express is still my go-to for Node apps. It’s been ten years since the pull request was opened for v5!

[blog] 5 Chunking Strategies For RAG. It’s cool seeing a sophistication of techniques getting widely shared now that many have embraced the fundamentals of LLMs.

[blog] Yes, AI will “take” your job. No, you won’t mind. I like the idea of AI “bringing up the skills floor” for programmers. That feels true.

[blog] Unpopular opinion about “Moving back to on-prem.” You can find a story that “proves” anything. Yes, some folks move workloads out of the cloud. No, it’s not a trend that I can see. Smart folks recognize what’s a differentiating investment, and what enables growth.

[blog] Vertex AI in Firebase is now Generally Available. I’m doubtful that tons of folks will regularly build “AI apps”, but I do expect that many of us will call LLMs as part of our “regular” apps. And integration with something like Firebase is awesome.

[blog] Mastering BigQuery’s Pipe Syntax: Streamlining Your SQL Queries. I can’t escape it. Every day I see a post about this syntax. What do you think? Will you try it?

[article] Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes. Do any of you think that your corporate well-being efforts are making a huge difference? Why or why not?

[repo] End-to-End Gen AI App Starter Pack. This looks interesting. It’s a reference app/system that shows you the components of a generative AI app.

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I’ve got a few AI items in the list today. Shocking, I know. But maybe this is the weekend you take a new tool for a spin?

[blog] Using the Kubernetes Resource Model for Declarative Configuration Q&A. Brian answers all the questions you could think of regarding the Kubernetes Resource Model and declarative configs.

[article] Citi reaps rewards from modernization investments. They’re seeing expenses go down and this transformation effort was triggered by compliance lapses. Whatever gets it going!

[blog] Compare Mode in Google AI Studio: Your Companion for Choosing the Right Gemini Model. This is such a useful way to compare the quality, latency, and overall results from different models or instructions.

[blog] What is Agentic AI? Agents are everywhere, and this post points out that agents are about decisions taken towards a goal.

[article] How To Build an AI Agent To Control Household Devices. Jani has a creative post that explains how he created an agent that controlled physical objects in his house.

[article] Container Security, with Michele Chubrika. Listen to this podcast episode or read the transcript to get smart insights into modern security with Kubernetes and containers.

[article] Did Automattic commit open source theft? Gergely provides a complete summary of this latest gaffe by the Automattic folks.

[blog] BigQuery Change Data Capture (CDC) using Pub/Sub. if your system can’t “speak” the language of the downstream system, sometimes you throw a proxy in between. This post shows how to use the gRPC API by sending data through Pub/Sub.

[article] 6 Essential Leadership Skills — and How to Develop Them. Good list, and all things that we can work on to lead better.

[blog] Revolutionizing SQL with pipe syntax, now available in BigQuery and Cloud Logging. This still feels weird to me, but at least I’m now trying pipe syntax.

[article] Why developers lose trust in AI tools. This reviews a paper of ours and identifies what causes distrust in AI tools, and recommendations for growing user trust.

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There’s a handful of career-oriented content in today’s list. You might always be thinking about your next step, or never thinking about it, but it’s not a bad idea to assess your current state every now and then!

[article] More attrition awaits overworked IT teams. Don’t just focus on employee satisfaction when the job market is hot. Continually try and build a good environment so that folks want to stay.

[blog] How Shopify improved consumer search intent with real-time ML. Why did Shopify go for near-real time embeddings for use with ML models versus a simpler batch approach? Good details here.

[blog] Management or IC: What’s Your Next Move? There are some good myths and realities in this post. I’ve definitely learned that management is a new job, not a variation of IC work.

[blog] Safer with Google: Advancing Memory Safety. Here are some details about how we’re looking at memory safe languages and reducing risk.

[article] Terraform Beta Supports Multicloud, Complex Environments. This looks at their Stacks product which was announced last year. It’s now ready for use.

[blog] New in NotebookLM: Customizing your Audio Overviews and introducing NotebookLM Business. The releases keep coming for this viral hit. Offering the Business version of this product is smart.

[blog] gRPC: 5 Years Later, Is It Still Worth It? This is widely used, but I wouldn’t call it mainstream. But support for gRPC in products as an available communication protocol is growing.

[article] Is Your Career Heading in the Right Direction? No idea, but I’m enjoying myself. It’s always good to check in with yourself (and trusted folks) to see if you’re satisfied and growing.

[blog] Get Started with Chrome Built-in AI : Access Gemini Nano Model locally. A lot of potential here! Learn how to tap into the built-in AI model for Chrome.

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I had a trip up to Sunnyvale today and some great chats with a pair of customers. Tomorrow, I’m speaking at an event and jetting back home. I enjoy testing out new ideas and messaging on unsuspecting folks!

[article] How CIOs are reskilling their workforce. You’re not going to hire a ton of AI experts. They’re not out there. But you can reskill and upskill your existing talent.

[blog] Beyond the basics: Build real-world gen AI skills with the latest learning paths from Google Cloud. If you’re upskilling, go to training that you can trust. These new learning journeys look great, and they’ll quickly make you functional with AI tech.

[blog] Implementing Private Service Connect for Cloud Run Applications. You want speed, and safety. Here’s how to get the easy deployment and ops of Cloud Run, but with secure access control.

[blog] Investigation of a Workbench UI Latency Issue. If you enjoy stories of debugging complex systems, this post from Netflix is for you.

[blog] Google Cloud Is Making GenAI Boring. You’re welcome? This post points out that we’re not playing follow-the-leader. We’re blending AI into our platform in creative ways, and making it easier to do important things.

[blog] The Inevitability of Mixing Open Source and Money. Armin says that the current state of open source and money is inadequate.

[article] What Platform Engineering Meant for Adidas’s SREs. Lots of details here about a transition to platform engineering.

[blog] Fine-tuning Gemma, the journey from beginning to end. It doesn’t matter if you care about Gemma, or prefer other open LLMs. Read this post to learn some of the terminology and activities that matter when fine tuning models.

[blog] SMURF: Beyond the Test Pyramid. This short post from our Testing experts encourages a more robust way to think about your test suite and identifies where tension can exist.

[article] Doctors complain of IT ‘in the stone age’. Short post, but a reminder that there’s much to do to make healthcare easier. I talked to smart folks last week that demoed one solution.

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Check out a mix of content in today’s reading list. The one on “red flags from hiring managers” got me thinking of interviews I’ve conducted recently. FYI, you’re not as stealth using ChatGPT or Gemini as you think you are 🙂

[blog] Ray Batch Inference at Pinterest (Part 3). The team at Pinterest has seen better performance and lower cost by using the Ray framework for offline batch interference of ML models.

[article] Friday Forward – Great Company. What are the traits of a great company? Bob says it’s about a product/service people love, great culture and people, and operational excellence.

[blog] Advanced RAG Techniques. The slides and video here will definitely up your game on retrieval augmented generation. I’m impressed with how the topic is covered.

[blog] Using API keys (and other sensitive data) in a Colab notebook. It takes extra effort to stash credentials in a safe place versus just hard-coding them into an app or notebook. Alicia shows one way to securely store and use API keys.

[article] The 4 Interview Red Flags Hiring Managers Say Concern Them Most. These are definitely caution areas, and this post has good advice on how to avoid making these mistakes.

[article] How Fireship became YouTube’s favorite programmer. I’ll admit that I’m not a “watch YouTube videos for hours” kinda guy, but it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole with Fireship videos. And I learn a bunch about tech!

[blog] Google Pipe Syntax: Modernizing SQL Without Sacrificing its Strengths. I’m getting worn down by all the pipe syntax content lately, and will likely give in and try using it.

[article] Internal Developer Platform: Insights from Conversations with Over 100 Experts. An IDP can be pretty much whatever someone wants it to be. This post looks at a maturity model, how to assess your own approach, whether to build or buy, and more.

[blog] How Low Can You Go? An Analysis of 2023 Time-to-Exploit Trends. it’s getting risky out there! Make sure you at least have a strong patching system in place.

[blog] Firebase Data Connect: now in public preview! I’m going to get hands-on with this myself, as it seems like a remarkably developer-friendly way to access robust database services.

[blog] The challenge presented by Secrets in declarative configuration. Good topic and one that matters for those who are creating lots of Terraform all over the place!

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It was good to get back into a routine today! Check out some good items below, especially the first one.

[blog] How Hard Should Your Employer Work to Retain You? Goodness, what a post. Charity wrote a must-read piece for managers and individual contributors. Full of straight talk!

[blog] Better together: BigQuery and Spanner expand operational insights with external datasets. Nobody in the cloud pre-integrates like we do. Here’s another case of services that will cleanly work together. From BigQuery, issue queries to Spanner as if they were native tables within BigQuery. No data movement required.

[article] CIQ Unveils a Version of Rocky Linux for the Enterprise. If you’ve been hunting for an open, enterprise-grade Linux distribution since Red Hat retired CentOS, consider Rocky Linux.

[article] Replit’s Path to Product-Market Fit—The $1 Billion Side Project. Good story of having a vision in mind, and following the twists and turns along the way to building a product that resonates.

[blog] Introducing AI-powered app dev with code customization from Gemini Code Assist Enterprise. Time for a second look at Gemini Code Assist? Get strong enterprise features, customization based on code in GitHub and GitLab, a big input token window, and much more.

[blog] What Message Queue-Based Architectures Reveal About the Evolution of Distributed Systems. I started my career on this tech, and it’s definitely not flashy nowadays. But is it just core infrastructure that everyone assumes we need? This should be a good topic for Redmonk to explore.

[blog] Database Center — your AI-powered, unified fleet management solution. Can’t transform apps if you don’t transform ops. Here’s another solution for those trying to get a handle on their database estate.

[blog] Announcing Deno 2. In exploring this latest release of the JavaScript runtime, Simon uncovered a Jupyter notebook kernel in there. Nice option for those that want notebooks!

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Flying home today, and thankful for decent wifi on this flight. Not good enough to do real work, but good enough to catch up email and do some tech reading. Enjoy the weekend.

[blog] Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis & John Jumper awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Very impressive! Yes, Google is a successful commercial company, but I appreciate the deep investment in research we have here.

[article] Open source business model struggles at WordPress. No one is looking good here, but one side looks significantly worse. It doesn’t give me a ton of confidence in the platform!

[blog] Achieve global scale and greater flexibility with new Memorystore enhancements. In-memory caches are important. Now you can spin up Redis and Valkey datastores with cross-region replication and even single-shard clusters.

[article] How to Give Busy People the Time to Innovate. I liked many of the points in this article, and it’s something that matters if you need time for innovation, or want to free up your team to do creative work.

[blog] Project Shield expands free DDoS protection to even more organizations and nonprofits. It’s great that we’re offering this type of protection to companies that might struggle to protect themselves from online attacks.

[article] Gradio 5 is here: Hugging Face’s newest tool simplifies building AI-powered web apps. You’re familiar with this tool if you’ve thrown simple web interfaces atop an LLM. Now, it’s getting some enterprise-y features.

[blog] Valkey Momentum: Seven Months In. Here’s some excellent, well-rounded research from Rachel that explores the Redis project and its viable alternatives.

[blog] Using BigQuery Omni to reduce log ingestion and analysis costs in a multi-cloud environment. This is an excellent idea. Here’s a simplified architecture for storing and analyzing logs that sit in different clouds.

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Today was the last full day of my trip to Sweden, and it was a busy one. I was part of the keynote at our Google Cloud Summit Nordics, participated in a panel interview, did three customer briefings, delivered a 45-minute talk and demo, and did a press interview. Back home tomorrow!

[blog] Local Development with Google Cloud Managed Service for Apache Kafka. I’ve played with this Kafka service, but smarter folks than me are doing more legit scenarios.

[article] How to Manage — and Avoid — Mental Fatigue. Short-ish post, but a good reminder to pay attention to fatigue and take active steps to reduce it.

[blog] Transcribe everything everywhere all at once with Chirp 2. We’ve gotten pretty good at language-based AI (see: NotebookLM) and this model does some great transcription.

[article] The State of Security in 2024. Here’s new survey data from O’Reilly that tells us what security professionals are worried about, and what they’re learning about.

[article] Fei-Fei Li picks Google Cloud, where she led AI, as World Labs’ main compute provider. Companies old and new, large and small are moving towards Google Cloud. Glad to have World Labs aboard.

[blog] Distributed Transactions in Go: Read Before You Try. If you have to do distributed transactions, there’s a chance you took a wrong turn somewhere.

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Another packed day in Stockholm, with a keynote rehearsals for keynotes tomorrow. What a treat to get to work with and learn from folks around the world!

[blog] Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases. This article popped up for me today, and even though it’s four years old, Jaana’s wisdom is still on point.

[blog] Introducing AI-powered app dev with code customization from Gemini Code Assist Enterprise. Great update to this constantly-improving AI assistance experience. For devs in the IDE, it’s powerful. And now the Enterprise edition brings AI assistance to multiple cloud services.

[blog] What is Infrastructure as Data? What does this even mean? Is it all about having a serializable data structure that gets applied to infrastructure? Brian explores.

[blog] How to protect your site from DDoS attacks with the power of Google Cloud networking and network security. You deserve nice things. Companies of any size experience distributed denial of service attacks, but running in the right cloud can keep you safer.

[article] Knowledge workers lean on AI as workloads increase. Another survey showing that execs and workers have different awareness about AI usage, and that folks feel under-trained.

[article] Stop Ignoring Your High Performers. I was convicted about this point when I read Andy Grove’s book a few years back. You might mistakenly think high performers have it all figured out and should be left alone. That’s wrong. Spend MORE time with these folks.

[youtube-video] Deno 2 is here… will it actually kill Node.js this time? There was a ton of info packed into this 4-minute video and now I’m kinda psyched to use Deno.

[article] NotebookLM podcasts — the missing piece in the GenAI puzzle? Is this easily our most viral tech release in 2024? Probably. Tom looks at using NotebookLM in a technical context to better understand complex material. Daniel was also blown away.

[article] Enterprises cling to mainframe as cloud expands. It’s not a zero sum game. Just because Cloud grows, it doesn’t mean on-premises (necessarily) shrinks.

[blog] Don’t deploy these applications on serverless. For those whose serverless worldview consists of Amazon Lambda, this advice makes sense. For devs that use more modern runtimes (*cough* Cloud Run *cough*), these aren’t necessarily the same concerns.

[blog] Defining statistical models in JAX? We don’t make a lot of noise about JAX and why it’s awesome for ML Engineers. But many folks love using it.

[blog] Writing a circuit breaker in Go. How are you protecting your systems from cascading failures? Circuit breaker is one pattern to apply. This post looks at building one in Go.

[blog] Write better log queries, faster: Introducing pipe syntax in BigQuery and Cloud Logging. Maybe I’ll get into this? I don’t know. But if it makes querying easier, I’m all for it.

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Today was another packed day here in Sweden, but I’m learning things and hopefully proving helpful to the folks here. I still made time for reading, and you’ll find some good ones below.

[blog] An advanced LlamaIndex RAG implementation on Google Cloud. There’s no shortage of agent frameworks for building AI apps. This post goes deep into using LlamaIndex.

[blog] How to Boost Performance and Reduce Costs with Stateful Feature Backfill in Apache Beam. The Intuit engineering team wrote up a summary of how they load historical data to provide state for realtime processing pipelines.

[blog] Protocol Buffer as data type in Spanner. Protobufs are used to serialize structured data, and now the Spanner database supports storing and retrieving them.

[article] How Saboteurs Threaten Innovation–and What to Do About It. Good stuff from Steve Blank about recognizing the challenges you’ll face as a founder or innovator.

[article] AI adoption drives ‘unmanageable’ spike in cloud costs. Sounds like a mix of better financial planning and smart deployment strategies are needed here.

[blog] Reduce unexpected costs with the new AI-powered Cost Anomaly Detection. This is such a useful capability! Get some help spotting unusual spend before it goes out of control.

[blog] 🌤️ IDX and Cloud Workstations: two Google tools empowering Cloud Development. I’ve played around with IDX, and need to give it another go. Hosted dev environments haven’t had their big moment yet, but it may be coming.

[article] Anyscale: New Optimized Runtime for Ray, Kubernetes Operator. We offer Ray in Vertex AI and GKE. It’s definitely growing in popularity!

[blog] Vertex AI Model Garden: All of your favorite LLMs in one place. Hyperscale clouds offer a few ways to consume LLMs. Nikita does a good job here of showing one way to deploy an LLM for inference.

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