Category: Daily Reading List

I spent the weekend in Washington DC and got home last night. Back to it today, with some reading list items that will make you think.

[article] Retrieval Interleaved Generation (RIG): When real-time data retrieval meets response generation. Here’s a good deep-dive into this technique that differs from RAG, but fits more complex scenarios that demand factual information.

[guide] Migrate from AWS to Google Cloud: Migrate from Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL to Cloud SQL and AlloyDB for PostgreSQL. Big, impressive guide for those looking to upgrade their cloud, and their database services.

[blog] How streaming LLM APIs work. You probably want big LLM results coming back as a stream versus in a single chunk, and Simon shows how 3 top models handle that.

[blog] Generate Podcast episode for Google Cloud Technology Nuggets. Do you create internal or external release notes or content roundups? Follow Romin’s lead and generate a realistic-sounding podcast with AI.

[blog] Different ways of working with SQL Databases in Go. Folks have their go-to techniques for calling databases from code, but it’s good to refresh your understanding of the available options.

[blog] Charting Your AI Native Journey. Great read, and thought-provoking in its approach. Guy shows one way to categorize AI tools and gives examples of what falls into each bucket.

[article] Google Proposes Adding Pipe Syntax to SQL. I barely write functional SQL the traditional way. I’m likely a “pass” on pipe syntax.

[blog] FSL: A Better Business/Open Source Balance Than AGPL. For single vendor OSS projects, I can understand why this is a strong choice for licensing your work.

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I’m flying to Washington DC today with my oldest son to look at colleges. It was a vacation day from work (mostly), but I still did some reading worth sharing.

[article] Techniques to Tackle Technical Debt with Dustin Thostenson. Read this transcript (or listen to the podcast itself) for insights into identifying, prioritizing, and fixing tech debt.

[article] Paying down tech debt: further learnings. More on tech debt! This looks at incremental and big-bang approaches.

[blog] Debunking Kafka Top 5 Use Cases. Derek’s had enough of people throwing too many use cases at their Kafka infrastructure.

[article] Google’s NotebookLM evolves: What IT leaders need to know about its enterprise applications. This is the most interesting AI tech from the past month, and that’s saying something. And it embeds a tweet from me, so you KNOW it’s good.

[blog] Innovating at the speed of light: A CosMc’s story. You don’t have to be a small company to be nimble. McDonald’s folks share how they went from concept to reality in a short time.

[article] AWS sees customers repatriating workloads as cloud wars heat up. I think what you’re seeing is folks who lifted-and-shifted having buyers remorse. And a few cloud vendors cleaned up on those early migrations, but now have unsettled tenants.

[blog] Cost management for AI/ML platforms with Google Kubernetes Engine. Use clouds the right way, and repatriation will seem silly. I like when clouds make it easier to use them the right way.

[blog] Google is a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management. Speaking of GKE, it’s still among the best ways to do Kubernetes in the cloud. I use all the options from the major hyperscalers, and don’t think it’s as close as represented here!

[blog] Pulumi Google Cloud Provider Version 8.0.0. If you’re using Pulumi already, or just looking to get rolling with a good infrastructure automation strategy, take a look at what’s new.

[article] Pfizer’s Future of Development. How does a big company truly change how they deliver software? I like the focus areas here, and the outcomes are excellent.

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It’s been a long week! I spent some time this afternoon setting up a new work laptop, and I’m going to foolishly bring it on a trip tomorrow. What could go wrong?

[article] Valkey 8.0 rides high at Open Source Summit in Vienna. It’ll be interesting to see where this fork starts to distinguish itself and diverge from Redis functionality.

[blog] 9 new features we announced at Made on YouTube 2024. I can’t say that any of these apply to me directly, but it’s a guarantee I’ll interact with the results by YouTube creators.

[blog] Keys to a resilient Open Source future. Is AI going to be the best option for open source security? It might be, given the scale of code we’re talking and the volunteer-heavy approach.

[blog] Introducing Netflix’s Key-Value Data Abstraction Layer. Abstractions are tricky to maintain, and can accidentally block you from using unique features underneath. But for scenarios like this, the use case makes sense to me.

[article] Deno 2 Arrives With Long-Term Support, npm Compatibility. Migrating to this Nodejs replacement will be easier now, for those interested.

[blog] Quitting Time. Perseverance is important, but so is knowing when to quit. What’s your criteria, and can you stick to it?

[blog] Apache Airflow ETL in Google Cloud. The spectrum of hosting options is typically raw compute, managed compute, and managed servcies. That applies here as well.

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Today was another day of team meetings so I was offline for much of it. But I got some good early-morning reading finished, and you’ll find them in my 400th list below.

[article] Mistral launches a free tier for developers to test its AI models. Every dev loves a good sandbox environment. Mistral is encouraging folks to give their models a try.

[article] Writing CNNs from Scratch in PyTorch. If you’ve been dying to create convoluted neural networks, follow along with this tutorial.

[article] Are You Done Yet? Mastering Long-running Processes in Modern Architectures. Bernd knows what he’s talking about, so learn from him in this talk/transcript about long running workflows.

[article] Go makes a comeback: What’s fueling its revival? This article proposes that Go is getting more popular because of its security posture and AI friendliness.

[blog] Cloud CISO Perspectives: The high value of cross-industry communication. It’s good to see that companies and organizations of all kinds willingly partner together to solve security challenges.

[article] Study Finds No DevOps Productivity Gains from Generative AI. Hmm. I haven’t seen findings like this, which is why the article caught my eye. Run your own analysis when you introduce these tools into your environment to see where it makes a positive difference.

[article] Open Source: Paid Maintainers Keep Code Safer, Survey Says. A lot of folks depend on software with a small number of maintainers. This says that those who are paid spend more time on security work.

[article] Home Depot builds DIY GenAI model that tells human employees what to say. This post looks at a new whitepaper from the home improvement giant. They’re using a RAG pattern to help with support chats.

[article] This Is How To Conquer Anxiety: 4 Secrets From Research. You may not conquer anxiety, but these are solid ways to get it under control or reframe it.

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I had team meetings today, which made me grateful to work with excellent folks. Before starting this offsite, I read through some fascinating pieces that you’ll find below.

[article] How a Playful Mindset Can Boost Creativity on Your Team. Where do you get your best ideas? You probably didn’t say “at my desk in the office.” Play matters.

[blog] Is OpenTelemetry Open for Business? September 2024 Update. If you’re betting on this framework for observability, is it supported for your languages and platforms of choice?

[blog] Advancing Our Chef Infrastructure. I can’t imagine that companies swap out infrastructure-as-code or configuration management investments often. Slack is all-in on Chef, and explains their evolution.

[blog] Chat with your business data – Conversational Analytics comes to Gemini in Looker. To me, one of the underrated of all this generative AI business is the new ability to explore and find information without needing to know SQL.

[blog] Should we decompose our monolith? This post looks at the messy world of today’s environments where there’s a mix of monolithic and microservice approaches.

[blog] Exploring BigQuery Time Travel: Historical Querying with Practical Examples. It’s powerful to be able to query data from a specific point in time.

[blog] Legacy Modernization meets GenAI. The ThoughtWorks crew has an interesting tool they’ve built to make modernizations better and more approachable.

[blog] From keywords to relationships: Reveal deeper insights with full-text search and Spanner Graph. These folks make the case that graph and full-text search are better in one system. And they bring examples.

[article] How (and why) should teams try distributed pair programming? While some companies are pushing return-to-office, many still have distributed teams that need to work together. This post looks at a study showing what makes distributed pair programming successful.

[blog] Accelerate Ray in production with new Ray Operator on GKE. Check a box, get a rich AI workload system installed into your Kubernetes cluster. I like it.

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As hoped for, I mostly skipped doing work this weekend and spent longer-than-expected building an Apollo 11 lunar lander with one of my kids. We had fun. Today was back to the work that pays for these Lego sets.

[article] Non-Obvious Signs of Early Startup Traction — And How to Spot Them. For founders, but I think this also applies for any major endeavor. Are you missing the signs that things are actually starting to take off?

[blog] Building LLM-powered applications in Go. Eli reminds us that the vast majority of “AI apps” are really just like apps that call LLMs. He shows off a handful of ways to create a RAG server in Go.

[blog] The Top 50 Tips for Better Angular Development. None of that “five hints” or “three best ways” stuff here. We’re going for the full fifty tips. Good guidance for frontend devs.

[blog] Grounding AI in reality with a little help from Data Commons. I shared this new DataGemma model last week, and this Google Research paper goes deeper into the idea of “grounded AI.”

[blog] Open Source Foundations Considered Helpful. Do open source foundations just exist to throw lavish conferences? Nah. They add legit value, as James points out here.

[blog] Unit Testing in Beam: An opinionated guide. I can’t say I’ve seen a lot of guidance around how to test data pipelines. Here’s direction on unit tests.

[blog] RAG API. Here’s a good post about a managed solution for augmenting your LLM requests with customized data sources. I hadn’t tried this service out yet, and now i want to.

[youtube-video] Safe RAG for LLMs. *Three* RAG pieces today? Let’s embrace the discomfort. I liked this video which looked at patterns for RAG that avoid data leakage.

[article] Predicting developer attrition. How do you know a developer is on their way out the door? This paper looks at attrition and notes how burnout prevention and “opportunities to learn” are big factors.

[article] Why Companies Should Consolidate Tech Roles in the C-Suite. is tech leadership distributed within your company? Is there a single go-to person who’s accountable? The article says consolidation is happening.

[blog] How EA Sports protects their game servers with Cloud Armor. I didn’t know gaming was such a top target for DDoS attacks. Being able to protect yourself with a Google-scale managed service is a big deal.

[blog] 2030 HFS Services Technology Vision: The Future of Services is No Services. Service as software. That’s what’s being proposed here as a way to get out of the tech debt spiral.

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Today was a good day. I got enough done that I think I can skip most work this weekend, and build that Lego set sitting on my shelf that my kiddo been asking me “when can we build this?” This weekend, son.

[article] How Google build great engineering teams? Some good wisdom here from Addy that might be useful whether you’re a new team builder, or an experienced one.

[paper] Large Language Model-Based Agents for Software Engineering: A Survey. Check out this paper for a sense of why LLM tools are helpful in software engineering, why “agents” are different than straight-up using an LLM, and how these agents work.

[blog] Making mass changes to Infrastructure as Code. Are you able to change a lot of IaC configurations at once? Brian looks at why you might do that, and the challenges.

[blog] How Project Guideline helped me run a half marathon independently. Lovely story, and a reminder of how technology has given people mobility and freedom they had previously lost.

[article] 5 Ways Cursor AI Sets the Standard for AI Coding Assistance. This is definitely one of the buzziest tech tools of the year. Lots of folks like the completeness and flexibility.

[blog] GKE Enterprise: A platform engineered for success with Kubernetes. If the center of your internal platform is Kubernetes, you’ll want capabilities like these.

[blog] The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2024. Very little movement among the top 10. You’re not going to make a wrong bet on most of these! Check out the rankings over time too.

[blog] Intro to Ray for AI on Kubernetes. Kaslin explains this open source framework, why you’d use it, and how to get it running on Kubernetes.

[blog] Message Queues in System Design. Classic technology, but there’s always someone learning about it for the first time. Posts like this are a solid intro to how and when to use queues.

[blog] A Patent Search Agent with LangChain and Reasoning Engine. This shows you how to use a LangChain-as-a-Service experience to host AI agents.

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I’m starting to wonder if I’m writing too much. Between this daily list, blog posts (new one today), and a couple newsletters each week, maybe I need to use other mediums too. I dunno. Hopefully you’re enjoying it!

[blog] Notes from my appearance on the Software Misadventures Podcast. Some fun, pragmatic quotes from Simon in this podcast.

[blog] DataGemma: Using real-world data to address AI hallucinations. Take a look at this. Here’s a new set of open models based on tons of real-world data that improves trustworthiness.

[blog] Learning to Reason with LLMs. The much-discussed new model from OpenAI is out there. Looks impressive

[article] How does Copilot impact the day-to-day software engineering experience? This post digs into a recent study of GitHub Copilot usage and its broader impact.

[article] 5 lessons I learned after conducting 100+ customer interviews. These are valuable lessons and should encourage us to approach user research differently.

[paper] Protecting Multi-Cloud Resources in the Era of Modern Cloud-Based Cyberattacks. This post has a direct link to a paper (no registration required) that explains strategies to protecting multi-cloud resources. Good content!

[blog] How big up-front design fails. Here are some lessons learned from projects with big upfront planning and design, and why a more iterative approach works better.

[podcast] 274: The Cloud Pod is Still Not Open Source. This latest episode of the podcast that reviews news from AWS, Microsoft and Google spent some time discussing my recent post about technical debt. Neat!

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23 years later, I still think about where I was the moment I heard that a plane crashed into the Twin Towers. Let’s never forget.

[youtube-video] Decoding Google Gemini with Jeff Dean. I liked this episode of the DeepMind podcast featuring our Chief Scientist. Jeff shares history, and future.

[article] Has Splitting Into ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ Loops Sent DevOps to the Dark Ages? Has disproportional investment in dev activities impacted overall flow? Is the outer loop neglected and holding back progress? Interesting perspective here.

[blog] Kaggle Model Upload Made Easy. Millions of folks use Kaggle to try models, access datasets, compete in AI competitions, and more. This post looks at how you upload models.

[blog] Inside Expedia’s Migration to ScyllaDB for Change Data Capture. Good story from Expedia on why and how they migrated to a different database engine. That’s a BIG exercise, but it seems they did it well.

[repo] Automatic Password Rotation. Do you regularly rotate your database passwords? Is that a manual or automated process? This reference architecture (and IaC scripts) shows you how to do it.

[blog] NotebookLM now lets you listen to a conversation about your sources. This seems like related to tech to what I shared yesterday (Illuminate). Super cool stuff.

[article] Mistral releases Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model. Models that can handle text, audio, and images are valuable. You’ll likely see more of them, and now Mistral joins the party.

[article] Oracle Database is in many enterprises and now it’s in Google Cloud too. Oracle’s had a good week. They’ve got strong partnerships with each hyperscaler and seem to have some good momentum.

[blog] How to build a custom Gmail Add-on w/ Gemini to find dates 📅. Fun example app from Zack. Use this to extract potential calendar appointments from the contents of an email.

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Big reading list today. Sorry, not sorry. Hopefully you find a few fun things that catch your eye.

[blog] Free Tools Every ML Beginner Should Use. There’s seemingly a new AI/ML tool released every day, but these are mature options for beginners and experts.

[blog] The AI detective: The Needle in a Haystack test and how Gemini 1.5 Pro solves it. Long context isn’t the answer to everything (see the paper below), but Gemini’s ability to find a needle in the haystack is very impressive.

[blog] How DevOps can come back from the dead, and why it must. Coté says it’s time to distinguish DevOps from concepts that superseded it, like platform engineering.

[blog] How to Manage Python Dependencies in Cloud Functions. Learn how Kiran moved functions from Lambda to Google Cloud and handled Python package dependencies.

[blog] Cloud Run job with a Python Module. Background jobs with Cloud Run are great. Mazlum offers a detailed post about using Python modules with them.

[paper] In Defense of RAG in the Era of Long-Context Language Models. We got it going with Gemini’s 1m (now 2m) long context window, but now other models are starting to grow their input token size. But does that negate the need for RAG? Not according to this paper.

[site] Illuminate. Coolest thing I saw today. Generate an on-demand “podcast” for research papers and books. Try it with the paper above. Worked amazingly well.

[blog] Introducing backup vaults for cyber resilience and simplified Compute Engine backups. This seems like an industrial-grade solution for protecting your most important apps. And it seems straightforward to turn on.

[article] Coaching Founder Mode. Marty offers a must-read essay that proposes all product leaders be coached into a “founder mode” mindset.

[article] Take Your First Steps with Git. Git is for more than just developers; I’ve seen content authors, ops folks, database pros, and product managers rely on it. Having a base understanding is helpful.

[blog] Write Change-Resilient Code With Domain Objects. Here’s some helpful guidance on the Google Testing blog that might help you write code that handles changes better.

[blog] Tinder API Style Guide — Part 1. Creating some API standards around URI patterns and headers? Take a look at what the Tinder engineering team put together.

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