Category: Daily Reading List

Fifteen or so meetings today, and I’m still standing. It’s good that I like these people. Below, you’ll find some thought-provoking content on leadership, OSS, and disruption.

[blog] Populating documentation templates using AI. Tom’s on a content heater right now. Here’s another fascinating post about using generative AI to get an initial draft of documentation.

[article] 3 Ways Humility Can Undermine Your Leadership. You often hear about the importance of servant leadership, humility, etc. I’m a big believer in that. But this post offers a constructive lens on when it can go wrong.

[blog] Creating Spring-based gRPC microservices managed by Prometheus and Grafana. This is a good deep dive that does exactly what the title says.

[article] Applying the DevEx framework. If you care about developer experience and productive software teams, you’ll like this exploration of a particular framework.

[article] Open Source Software Use Driven by Cost Cutting, Survey Says. Some new survey data shows that “access to innovation” and “modernizing the technology stack” aren’t the most popular reasons people use open source nowadays. It’s about cost.

[blog] Data Reliability at Chick-fil-A. The CFA folks apply principles from Site Reliability Engineering to something they call Data Reliability Engineering. The focus of the post is on a homegrown tool they use to conduct data quality checks.

[blog] Croissant: a metadata format for ML-ready datasets. Data is represented all sorts of ways when feeding it into pipelines for model training. This new format looks to standardize a bit, and already has some industry commitment.

[blog] Risk-Aware Product Decisions in A/B Tests with Multiple Metrics. Lots of details in this post from Spotify engineers. Learn about their decision rules for taking results of experiments and using in product decisions.

[blog] AI startups require new strategies: This time it’s actually different. Startups can’t use the same playbook of expecting incumbents to be slow with new tech or poaching talent when it comes to AI.

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Do you plan on going to many in-person tech events this year? If so, are you looking at local events or actually getting on a plane to go somewhere? It seems like folks are traveling more, but training budgets continue be tight across the industry. Even if you can’t go anywhere right now, I’ll try to bring the learning to you with these reading lists!

[blog] Shifting Security Down Early. I didn’t just read and share this because it references my “shift down” metaphor. Doesn’t hurt, though. Aron offers up a good take on security in the dev lifecycle.

[article] When New Hires Get Paid More, Top Performers Resign First. Interesting findings. If you level up existing staff salaries when new (highly paid) folks join, people stay. When you don’t, the high performers disproportionally leave.

[blog] Running AI on fully managed GKE, now with new compute options, pricing and resource reservations. It seems like nothing in the world is getting cheaper, especially anything associated with AI. So hey, let’s rejoice that GPU workloads in Kubernetes are cheaper than before.

[article] Legacy tech is still popping up as a cost-control barrier. Short piece, but a reminder that you can’t put off modernization for long and expect to keep successfully shoving new tech into your architecture.

[blog] Reverse engineering prompts. This post brought me joy. I’ve never thought of asking an LLM for a prompt that would generate the output I want. I tried with Duet AI and got it to give me a really good prompt for an existing block of Go code. Love that idea as a way to learn good prompting.

[blog] Secure by Design: Google’s Perspective on Memory Safety. You may be like us and moving towards memory-safe languages, but also in possession of piles of C or C++ code. Here’s what we’re considering.

[blog] Improving Shopify App’s Performance. What’s the worst feedback you can hear about a distributed or complex app? “Feels slow.” Where do you even START? Shopify wanted to improve the performance of their app, and tackled three different performance bottlenecks.

[article] Exploring the API of Google’s Gemini Language Model. Learn about the types of API parameters you find in LLMs like Gemini.

[blog] “Bad” Strategy. Why? Have you said to yourself “my company has no real strategy”? COME ON SUITS UPSTAIRS, FIGURE IT OUT. But we don’t always see the whole picture, as John talks about here.

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Good day, and I’m heading out to meet a friend for tacos by the beach. No complaints! I really enjoyed the items I read today, and I think you will too.

[blog] All you need is Wide Events, not “Metrics, Logs and Traces.” So good. Talk about a post that makes you rethink things! Ivan explains a key aspect of real observability.

[blog] Cloud CISO Perspectives: Building better cyber defenses with AI. Digital security is ripe for positive impact from AI. The preamble in this post is an important look at what’s possible.

[blog] Building a flexible platform for optimal use of LLMs. I think we’re going to see a LOT of this in 2024. Most every company will be building generative AI platforms for their teams to use. Here is what Intuit is doing.

[blog] Go slices, deleting items, and memory usage. Did you think that so much went into creating a “delete” operation on an array type? I was fascinated by Val’s explanation of what he added to the Go standard library.

[blog] Using Duet AI to generate a Starter App from an OpenAPI Specification. I like this. Maybe one of the issues in years past with a spec-first approach to APIs was that it wasn’t easy to implement that spec in code. With generative AI dev tooling, it is.

[article] The open source problem. Matt says the big problems with OSS isn’t corporations using it without contributing. Rather, it’s that users/devs really only have one choice when licensing their creations.

[article] Using AI to Help Developers Work with Regular Expressions. Are you good at writing regular expressions? My friends, I am not. This seems like a good scenario for AI assistance. This article looks at a few options at your disposal.

[blog] Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS. I’m glad we started this trend! The user wins. Love the cloud you’re in, but you shouldn’t be penalized on the way out.

[article] This Is The Easiest Way To Make Your Life More Awesome. Eric’s point is that you can improve your life through subtraction. There may be stages of life where you ignore this for good reason, but you likely settle into this reality over the long term.

[blog] Regional vs. zonal GKE clusters: making the right choice for your workloads. High availability is a choice in the public cloud. Sometimes it’s cheaper to be down then pay for extra resilience. Other times, downtime isn’t tolerable so you pay for better scale. This post explains some of the considerations.

[article] NIST 800-207A: Implementing Zero Trust Architecture. Read, watch, or ask AI to summarize this content. It’s a good overview of what it takes to establish a zero trust architecture.

[blog] Revolutionize Your CI/CD Pipeline: Integrating Testcontainers and Bazel. Here’s a deep walkthrough of two technologies that can help you produce self-contained build processes.

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Last Friday we had the day off, so I walked around our local zoo by myself. It was great! But I’m back in the saddle today, and this promises to be a very busy week. There’s always time for reading though, so please enjoy what I consumed today.

[blog] Introducing the next generation of Claude. Anthropic has raised a ton of money, and they’re putting it to good use. Their new models have excellent performance. And we’ve already got one of those available in Vertex AI.

[article] Add More Rigor to Your Reference Calls With These 25 Questions. This is a good list of questions you might pick from when checking in on external or internal job candidates.

[docs] Configure networks for FedRAMP and DoD in Google Cloud. You might not need or want DoD-level of security in your network architecture, but it’s useful to see what it looks like for highly regulated workloads.

[blog] The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 4s in nine solutions. Folks are still experimenting with how fast their language of choice can process a billion rows of data. This is an excellent review of multiple options using Go.

[article] Apple Open Sources Pkl, a Configuration as Code Programming Language. Do we need another DSL for configurations? I dunno, but Apple seems to like this one.

[article] How to Get Started with Google’s Gemini Large Language Model. Janakiram always does good tech deep dives, and this look at Gemini is easy enough to follow along with.

[blog] 4 Reasons to Use Angular for Your Next Web App. Love it. There are good reasons, but I also appreciate the quiet confidence of those using something good, who aren’t personally crushed if you don’t make the same choice.

[blog] The four tenets of SOA revisited. yes, tech is changing faster now than likely at any time in history. But there are plenty of durable ideas that stick around. Mark is starting a look at service oriented architecture principles.

[article] “Good enough” code is just not good enough. There are times when “good enough” is ok, but continuously adopting that approach doesn’t yield excellence in the long run.

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Tomorrow we get a Google-wide day off to recharge. I appreciate things like that. So, this will be the last reading list of the week.

[news] Stack Overflow and Google Cloud Announce Strategic Partnership to Bring Generative AI to Millions of Developers. I like this. Great StackOverflow content gets surfaced to devs on Google Cloud. And StackOverflow gets a great hosting partner, and access to the best AI tech. More from TechCrunch, and a piece from StackOverflow on how they partner.

[article] Improving Developer Experience Drives Profitability. You can ignore (important) outcomes like happier developers and high-quality software if you want. Even if you invest in dev experience for financial motives, the effort will be appreciated.

[article] Product-Focused Reliability for SRE. Outstanding piece from the Google SRE team that proposes a product-focused model for defining SLOs and service overall.

[blog] The industries leading on gen AI aren’t the ones you’d think. Would you have guessed that insurance, construction, and luxury goods companies would be the early adopters? Not me. Cool to see.

[article] Sigstore: Secure and Scalable Infrastructure for Signing and Verifying Software. You’d be right if you thought this was an in-the-weeds topic, but it does matter a ton. Skim through this to get smarter on this project.

[blog] Build AI-Powered Angular Apps with Google Gemini. Solid writeup here that gives plenty of examples of incorporating generative AI into web apps.

[blog] Strangulating the monolith to a pluggable and scalable architecture. The McDonalds team shares how they’re adopting microservices.

[blog] BigQuery and AlloyDB hit major milestone with AI-enabled updates. Big stuff here, including new support for models in BigQuery, vector search in our cloud databases, LangChain integrations, and more. Also see the BigQuery post and databases post.

[article] Kubernetes clusters are typically using just 13% of CPU: CIOs could save a small fortune. Cloud-based elastic clusters can definitely help here. I suspect that many folks provision Kubernetes like they (over)provisioned classic hardware.

[article] The Key to a Fulfilling Career? Variety. I get bored quickly at jobs, so this definitely resonated with me!

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I’m wiped after a busy day; it’s the 1:1 conversations that really do it to me. I’m an introvert, so it takes extra effort to dial up the listening, engaging, and emoting. Worth it, but exhausting. My “relaxation” time often involves stealing a couple minutes to read the items below.

[article] Meta’s new LLM-based test generator is a sneak peek to the future of development. Here’s a review of a paper from Meta about using LLMs to generate code improvements without regression and improve upon human-written tests.

[blog] Gemma, Ollama and LangChainGo. I’ve seen a lot of experiments with Gemma. Here, Eli shows how straightforward it is to run locally on your machine.

[guide] Infrastructure for a RAG-capable generative AI application using Vertex AI. This is an excellent new reference guide for a generative AI architecture consisting of data ingest, serving, and quality evaluation components.

[article] How Netflix Really Uses Java. The presentation and transcript includes lots of details about what’s running at Netflix, their key tech choices, and what they’re excited about.

[blog] Monitoring your latest app release just got easier. If you’re like me, you have very little patience for finicky mobile apps. This new Firebase dashboard lets you see key metrics in real-time after a release, which means you can fix things faster, and keep users happier.

[article] Periodic Face-to-Face. Martin Fowler says that even remote-first teams need face to face time to build trust, uncover ideas, and confirm direction.

[blog] The story of Google Nest’s migration to Cloud SQL on Google Cloud. Sometimes you switch cloud provider because an acquiring company asks you to! This is Nest’s story of moving self-managed data to a managed service in Google Cloud.

[blog] India’s bloated IT services firms must learn from their startups to avoid GenAI meltdown. Generative AI represents a fundamental change that I services firms need to adjust to. This piece has some frank advice.

[blog] How to prevent lateral movement techniques on Google Cloud. You don’t want attackers navigating across the network to find vulnerable resources. This post explores recent research from Palo Alto Networks, and how to avoid cloud misconfigurations.

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Today’s list has some fun content to chew on and consider more deeply. Look at items on productivity, interviewing, and figuring out AI for your company.

[blog] Build A Human-Centered Productivity Strategy. I’ve shared a lot here about developer productivity, but obviously it relates to a much broader discussion of how we work. This Forrester blog (which links to a $$ report) has good details on a better approach.

[article] 5 Ways to Prepare for Situational Interview Questions. Are you on the job market? I liked the simple interview frameworks put forth by this Harvard Business Review article.

[article] How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity. Speaking of interviewing, check out these excellent interview questions for those trying to judge whether a candidate is good at navigating uncertain and complex situations.

[blog] Explore Duet AI to assist with React frontend application development. Here’s a good example of using AI-assisted prompting to build something that can be complex for newcomers. And, even those with plenty of experience!

[article] How to cut through the AI noise. Enterprise companies making CapEx bets on AI-based tech seems … risky. There’s a lot of learning and scaling going on, and public cloud is designed for that.

[blog] Introducing internal range API: simplify IP address management in Google Cloud. This seems useful for those with big IP blocks in the cloud.

[blog] Cross-Cloud Network: Private, customizable and flexible networking. A double-dose of networking today, but I also liked this post about setting up a good cross-cloud network.

[article] We CAN Have Nice Things: Upgrading to Java 21 Is Worth It. When Josh talks about Java, I listen. These look like great additions to the language.

[blog] Increase Test Fidelity By Avoiding Mocks. Straightforward advice here: use the highest fidelity option to execute tests against dependencies.

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Did you have a good weekend? I think I did. This work week started fast, so the weekend is a distant memory. I really enjoyed today’s reading list, and I hope you do too.

[blog] How startups beat incumbents. Simply outstanding post. Study this for a way to think about disrupting incumbents, while also protecting yourself from disruption.

[blog] Minimal downtime migration from PostgreSQL database to Spanner PostgreSQL dialect database. Your code may have a lot of PostgreSQL-aware syntax, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use a cloud-native database like Spanner. This post shows how you can migrate the backend without changing the frontend.

[blog] Running machine learning in the cloud for live service games. You might not be in the gaming industry, but sometimes reference scenarios in other domains inspire us. This post (and accompanying GitHub repo) explain some valuable cases where gen AI will improve the experience.

[blog] Rust developers concerned about complexity, low usage. There’s no shortage of viable programming languages out there. Rust is popular, but these seem like legit concerns to work on.

[blog] Respond to Incoming SMS with NodeJS and Google Cloud Functions. The Twilio folks like to show how their platform works with others. Smart. They also just published one on sending SMS messages through Cloud Functions.

[blog] AI: The Difference Between Open and Open Source. Stephen looks at our recent Gemma AI model release, and not confusing “open” with “open source.”

[blog] Routing Enhancements for Go 1.22. These are common sense updates, and make Go much easier to use for HTTP services out of the box.

[blog] Auto-provisioning Artifact Registry though Cloud Run Source Deploys. Nice little post by my colleague that shows how to deploy serverless workloads without NEEDING to set up a specific spot to store app artifacts.

[article] What Makes a Code Change Easier to Review? Relatively short post that explores a paper about code changes. Specifically, it highlights the change description, size, and history as important factors.

[article] Sabre completes migration to Google Cloud, closes 17 data centers. Being halfway done a cloud migration isn’t a fun place to be. Companies like Sabre moved fast, and now they get to reap the benefits of being almost fully in cloud.

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Today’s reads are fairly Google-centric. On Fridays, I prepare 1-2 different newsletters, so I’m browsing through lots of that sort of content. Adjust your expectations accordingly!

[blog] Gemini image generation got it wrong. We’ll do better. I was embarrassed by these results, and I’m glad other folks at Google were too. Not ok. Accuracy is paramount to earning trust.

[blog] go run. This simple command lets Go developers run their app without any fuss. Chris writes a post celebrating its sneaky power.

[article] 3 Ways to Help Struggling Open Source Communities. It’s not someone else’s job to keep the open source we depend on healthy. It’s all of us, right? This article looks at how to keep showing support to your favorite community.

[blog] Orchestrate Vertex AI’s PaLM and Gemini APIs with Workflows. Chatbots won’t be the only way we interact with AI models. I can imagine a lot of back-office processes that can take advantage of AI in their workflows.

[blog] Cut Container Startup Time for Better Performance and Costs — Part2. Here’s a good deep dive into the various configuration and cluster changes you’d make to improve container startup time for a workload.

[blog] Summarizing meeting notes and amplifying visibility (prompt engineering). Can AI make meeting notes better? Probably. Tom has example prompts and workflows you can use too.

[blog] Test-Driven Development with Java, Spring Boot and Duet AI in GCP. This example uses one particular AI-assisted dev tool, but you can follow these terrific instructions in most other tools too.

[blog] What I like about Google’s Managed Prometheus. Some thing are inherently complex. Good products can still make it feel relatively simple to use. This is an example.

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Whew. Busy day, with lots going on. There’s always time to learn, however, and I learned a few things from today’s reading list.

[blog] Maturing Istio Ambient: Compatibility Across Various Kubernetes Providers and CNIs. Deep dive into the work needed to build a sidecar-less proxy Istio that works across distinct environments.

[blog] Making AI more Open and Accessible to Cloud Developers with Gemma on Vertex AI. Laurent offers useful details and examples of this new open model.

[blog] How the New York Times Games Data Team Revamped Its Reporting. Sometimes, a event triggers a long overdue change. Buying Wordle caused the NY Times team to get flooded with new data, and old reporting mechanisms weren’t sufficient.

[blog] gemini-cli: Access Gemini models from the command-line. Cool experiment that I may actually take advantage of. Eli wanted to feed info about old blog posts to create a “related posts” feature for his blog. So he built a tool that any of us could try.

[blog] Introducing Managed Instance Groups standby pool: Stop and suspend idle VMs. If you had a managed fleet of VMs in Google Cloud, you couldn’t stop or suspend them. Now, you can.

[article] Nitpicking at code reviews is bad for everyone. Put machinery in place to do syntax and formatting checks. Use code reviews for more meaningful validation.

[blog] Guide to Function Calling with Gemini and Google Apps Script. There’s no one “right” pattern for feeding data into generative AI-powered apps. Maybe you fine-tune a model. Or use a RAG-style architecture to feed extra context. And function-calling is another exciting option.

[paper] Considerations for Evaluating Large Language Models for Cybersecurity Tasks. New, short paper that lists out some considerations for security scenarios with LLMs.

[blog] Expanding our Partnership with Google. From the Reddit crew. Our post is here. Some media writeups exist too. In an LLM world, I can imagine that useful data sources will rightly monetize access.

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