Category: Daily Reading List

Woah, today’s reading list seems almost entirely focused on advice and good practices. I like when that happens. Invest in reading a few of these!

[blog] Building Etsy Buyer Profiles with LLMs. Etsy cares a lot about personalization, which makes sense given their business. Here’s how they built their new experience.

[blog] You are Doing MCP Wrong: 3 Big Misconceptions. This is full of very specific advice for those looking to introduce and expand usage of MCP in their agent environment.

[blog] Chain of Trust for AI: Securing MCP Toolbox Architecture on Cloud Run. Here’s an important topic. If you’ve got an MCP server that has backend database access, you must be SURE you’ve got a strong authn/authz approach.

[blog] Our Journey with Vibe Coding, what we’ve learnt over the past 6 months. There’s a lot of area covered in this post, so read slowly. I like seeing more and more of these “experience reports” coming out from developers.

[article] Effective Practices for Architecting a RAG Pipeline. Another good experience report. This time, based on experiences building a real pipeline for ingestion, chunking, retrieval, and more.

[article] Stop Force-Feeding AI to Your Developers. I actually think you SHOULD force-feed AI to developers, but I agree with this post that you shouldn’t use it to mask over other productivity investments that are needed first.

[blog] Serving Gemma 3 on GKE with TPUs and vLLM. Use GPUs or TPUs, either are fine with me. It’s great that you can use either in a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster.

[blog] Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed. This fast code editor got their Agent Client Protocol (ACP) rolling last week with us and the Gemini CLI. Now they continue bringing agent options in with Anthropic’s offering.

[article] When You’re Suddenly Managing More People—and Feeling Buried. I’ve felt this “leadership avalanche” three times in my career when my team went from size A to size B. The advice here is solid.

[blog] Unlocking Multimodal Video Transcription with Gemini — Part 1: 🔥 Challenge. You had me at “eight part series.” This set of posts offers up some terrific depth on comprehensive video transcription.

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Heading up to Mountain View to participate in some customer meetings at the mothership. It gave me an excuse to update some demos, and even prep some new things.

[article] Platform Engineering Patterns for Scalable Software Delivery. Here’s a panel discussion among a handful of pros with real-world knowledge about platform engineering.

[blog] Choosing measurement frameworks to fit your organizational goals. Which of the many frameworks should you use to measure software delivery? This post encourages you to think through the why, what, and how.

[blog] Your First Million Users: Is Your Database an Investment or a 900-Hour Time Sink? Is it cheaper to run databases on your own, or use a managed service? People have STRONG opinions on both sides of this. Here’s some analysis to consider.

[blog] What Exactly is “Production Ready” in 2025? We say this phrase but what do we really mean when we say it?

[article] Seven little habits for writing better code. Good tips, very specific practices that give you a maintainable codebase.

[blog] Running Secure Kubernetes (GKE) Workloads in GCP. This is the type of content you want loaded into your LLM context so that you get reasonable advice when you ask to “build a checklist to secure my Kubernetes cluster.”

[article] Is Your Talent the Bottleneck to GenAI Success? I’d suggest that in almost every case, the answer is no. You actually have the talent in place already. What you may not have done is properly train them and invest in their skills.

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Happy Fake Monday to my American readers who stumbled through a Tuesday after a long holiday weekend. The reading list today has some industry news, and also a handful of pieces that offer great insight into AI topics.

[blog] 📖 An Open Book: Evaluating AI Agents with ADK. Very good post that clearly explains how to create eval sets and test criteria before executing agent evaluations using the Agent Development Kit.

[blog] The core KPIs of LLM performance (and how to track them). Are there ten ideal LLM performance metrics? Three? Fifteen? I don’t know. Whatever you believe is fine, but it’s good to see what others think.

[article] MCP: the Universal Connector for Building Smarter, Modular AI Agents. I read a lot about MCP, but every article adds something to my knowledge base.

[blog] Go 1.25: The Container-Native Release. Go is already great for container workloads, but it looks like this latest release added some major improvements.

[blog] DocumentDB and the Future of Open Source. This will be an interesting project to watch, as many industry giants have backed it.

[article] Why DocumentDB can be a win for MongoDB. Matt used to work at MongoDB, and offers his own brand of helpful insight to where this might go.

[blog] Introducing your newest study buddy: stackoverflow.ai. Can StackOverflow ever rediscover its peak? Probably not, as the world has changed in a few ways. But they’re not sitting idly by.

[blog] Google Cloud’s open ecosystem for Apache Iceberg. It looks like the industry has quickly embraced Iceberg as a standard.

[article] Anthropic raises $13B Series F at $183B valuation. The spigot for AI funding is still flowing, and it’s going to be tough for new entrants who need to commit to a LOT of compute to keep up.

[blog] /whatsnew: A Custom Gemini CLI Command for Google Cloud Updates in Your Terminal. Fun idea that shows the art of the possible. Use a custom command in the CLI to retrieve release notes for your favorite cloud service.

[blog] Mass Intelligence. When you think about it, the fact that nearly everyone on the planet has access to unprecedented “intelligence” is bonkers. Ethan shares how we got here.

[article] Google avoids break up, but has to give up exclusive search deals in antitrust trial. This removes some uncertainty. Our response. Onward and upward.

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Good day. For you too? It’s a holiday weekend here in the States, so I’ll be off on Monday. The Reading List returns on Tuesday.

[blog] Why Aren’t People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore? We each see different things. In my recent experience, we’re turning people away by the hundreds for local events. Relevant topics have changed, formats are different, and communities don’t stay the same.

[article] From Black Box to Blueprint. Can you reverse engineer a system with the help of AI and use that insight to build a modernization blueprint? Thoughtworks shares their experience doing just that.

[blog] Happy birthday, GKE! Let’s celebrate with new features and better pricing. Our kid is growing up. The world’s best Kubernetes offering has simpler pricing (paid stuff is now free, and other aspects are add-ons versus entirely new service tier).

[blog] Do the simplest thing that could possibly work. I think we all know this, but it’s hard to do. We want to predict the future and build solutions, platforms, and structures that suit our expectations of what’s coming next.

[blog] Simplify complex eventing at Scale with Eventarc Advanced. I haven’t seen a new type of messaging engine in a LONG time. But here we have a new message bus based on Envoy. I’m going to dig into it this weekend.

[article] Fastly: Senior Devs Ship 2.5x More AI Code Than Juniors. Does extra debugging of all this extra code negate the time savings? This says maybe, but I think it’s TBD.

[blog] Five ways Skopeo can simplify your Google Cloud container workflow. Never heard of it, but I’m glad I know about it now. This looks like a very strong alternative to using the Docker daemon in certain settings.

[article] AI Contrarians on the Problems With Vibe Coding. It’s ok to be contrarian. I’ve been using these tools a fair bit, and have learned that it’s not all or nothing. With the right expectations, and using the right tool for the job, it’s objectively better.

[article] Legacy tech is hard to kill. Yes it is. Much easier to just add new fancy stop on top and leave the lower layers for the next sucker.

[blog] No More Coders? You Still Need DevOps. Andrew doesn’t believe that coders are going away, but execs who are hedging their bets might be de-emphasizing platform investments. Don’t do that.

[article] Evolving Kubernetes for generative AI inference. You can run AI workloads many ways, and Kubernetes has turned into quite a good option.

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I’m often grateful for all the individual contributors I work with, but today I was extra thankful to observe so many good managers in action. Management is often a thankless task. But the good ones expertly advocate for their staff, set smart priorities, and lead by example. We’ve got that in spades.

[blog] Some thoughts on LLMs and Software Development. Scattering of thoughts, but those who pay attention to many dimensions of our industry often have genuinely interesting perspectives about AI.

[blog] Developer Experience at Pinterest: The Journey to PinConsole. Here’s a good piece on the path towards an internal developer platform, its value, and where to start.

[blog] Run Gemini anywhere, including on-premises, with Google Distributed Cloud. Huge deal. Get this frontier model in your local data center. News here as well.

[article] Don’t Ship Your Pitch Deck to Your Website. Here’s How to Translate Your Story for Customers. Build a more authentic message and don’t hide behind corporate-speak or vagaries. That’s one takeaway I had from this article.

[article] AI agents spark mix of anticipation, skepticism and fear: Workday. Makes sense. It’s important to put agents into the spots where employees actually find them useful.

[article] How to avoid the risks of rapidly deploying AI agents. Seems directly relevant to the above article. Make good choices.

[blog] GKE under the hood: Container-optimized compute delivers fast autoscaling for Autopilot. What you do want rapidly deployed is your infrastructure. This new underlying platform gives you dramatically faster pod scheduling and overall scaling.

[article] Google and Grok are catching up to ChatGPT, says a16z’s latest AI report. This landscape has gotten interesting!

[article] LLM System Design and Model Selection. Nice writeup with tons of questions and dimensions to consider when choosing an LLM and LLM-based system architecture.

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I vibe coded an app today that uses our fancy new image generation model. My customer presentations are more interesting now (I think!) when I can create personalized apps and content for a customer.

[article] Google’s Gemini CLI Agent Comes to Zed. I’m running three different code editors now, which would have been absurd just a couple of years ago. Zed is pretty great, and now can incorporate agents like the Gemini CLI. Our post and Zed’s post cover it too.

[article] What happens when organizations display individual metrics vs team metrics? Good question. This research seems to show that team-based metrics drive better performance.

[blog] You Don’t Need a Bigger Platform Team, You Need a More Collaborative One. Speaking of working together, here’s a piece about a multiplayer mode for your platform efforts.

[article] IT, business leaders clash over cloud, data security. Maybe that dissatisfaction with cloud/AI/automation can be found later in the article. Supporting technology and security approaches don’t seem to be ready at these companies.

[blog] Everything I know about good API design. Useful stuff here on versioning, rate limits, authentication, and more.

[blog] APIs don’t make good MCP tools. I’m persuaded by these points. Just handing a pile of APIs to an agent doesn’t seem like an efficient thing to do.

[blog] This Week in Gemini CLI (vol. 3) 🚀. There are some good usability and productivity features in this latest drop.

[blog] How to Fix Your Context. This is from a couple months back, but I don’t think I saw it then. Or if I did, and had it in a reading list, I forgot about it. Either way, a helpful read.

[blog] Why Separate Databases? Explaining Like You’re Five. Premature optimization is always a danger. Do you need microservices, separate databases, and isolation everywhere? Not for many scenarios.

[blog] The 10 Steps for product AI generation with Gemini 2.5 Flash. Excellent content from Philipp that helps you design visually consistent images in an ecommerce situation. More advice from Googlers here.

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One reason that I could never be a solo worker is that I like the epiphanies that come from conversations with smart colleagues. Today there were a couple, and it makes me better at what I do.

[blog] Introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, our state-of-the-art image model. Remarkable model, and a whole new way to iterate on AI-generated images. Some press coverage here.

[blog] Building next-gen visuals with Gemini 2.5 Flash Image on Vertex AI. This will be the best image generation model you’ve ever used, and it’s not just for “fun” stuff outside of work. Use it in corporate settings as well.

[blog] Why Your Prompts Don’t Belong in Git. Haven’t seen this POV. There’s an argument for keeping prompts out of your source code.

[blog] How to use the AI Function in Google Sheets (with 10 examples). I don’t spend my day in spreadsheets, but if I did, this AI function would drive a lot of value.

[blog] Who are we designing for now? You’ve got to ask and answer this question. Your UI and APIs now have agentic consumers which require new patterns.

[blog] Announcing general availability of Firestore with MongoDB compatibility. You want to use MongoDB, but also want easy scale, a great SLA, and pay-as-you-go pricing? We’ve got that.

[blog] From massive models to mobile magic: The tech behind YouTube real-time generative AI effects. Interesting behind-the-scenes look at how we do generative AI effects for mobile users.

[blog] How we leveraged vLLM to power our GenAI applications at LinkedIn. There’s a lot of AI happening at LinkedIn (good and bad), but go into the architecture by reading this post.

[article] Developers lose focus 1,200 times a day — how MCP could change that. I’m down with this. We’re all using too many apps and context switching more than needed. If MCP (or whatever) makes it easier to pull the data and actions we need into the place we’re at, it’s a win.

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Tonight I’m attending an in-person draft for the Fantasy Football league I’m in. I asked Gemini Deep Research for a draft strategy given the parameters of the league, so this may be how I’ll know if we’ve achieved AGI or not.

[article] The Number One Productivity Killer for Devs? Finding Information! Some dire findings here. Developers can’t seem to find what they’re looking for, even though AI tools are saving them 10 hours a week. And, the mismatch with executive expectations continues.

[blog] NotebookLM’s Video Overviews are now available in 80 languages. Assuming that devs (or anyone) can find the source material, tools like this make it much faster to make sense of it.

[article] Timeouts, Retries and Idempotency In Distributed Systems. These are key fundamentals to understand if you’re building a distributed system, or asking an AI agent to do so.

[blog] Google Cloud Security Command Center: Your Centralized Security Nexus. I think every cloud has some sort of centralized security system. Ours is SCC, and it’s a comprehensive tool. This is a good overview.

[article] Does AI spell the death of front-end engineering? Death? No. But I do wonder about the impact now that it’s much simpler for a backend/fullstack engineer to craft functional frontends with AI.

[article] Outdated Python Versions Cost Companies Millions. Even if you don’t care about the features in a new version of your programming language, you’re likely missing out on key performance updates that can save you real money.

[blog] A Developer’s Guide to Model Routing. Learn why model routing is important, and then see a good example of building your own lightweight router.

[article] Why getting to bug zero is so hard. It’s not so simple to get rid of all the bugs in your issue list. Tom looks at a spectrum of bugs and how to tackle them.

[blog] The Story of Valkey. It’s an interesting story, and one that’s showing surprising staying power.

[blog] Gemini CLI Observability with OpenTelemetry. Cool post. I didn’t know about (or, forgot about) the OpenTelemetry support for our agentic CLI. I’d imagine that getting metrics about token and tool use could be very important.

[article] Our Favorite Management Tips on Leading Effective Meetings. Solid list that’s worth reviewing if you need to refresh your meeting strategy.

[blog] Build vs Buy in the Age of AI. I liked the perspectives here on “user programming tools” and why business software won’t get replaced by vibe-coded alternatives, but big changes are still coming.

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If you read every word of today’s list, you might develop a cramp from sitting too long. There are a few meaty posts in here, but all worth a skim!

[blog] Building a Semantic Cache with BigQuery Vector Search. I learned something about the pattern, and technology options, from this post.

[blog] The reality of AI-Assisted software engineering productivity. Grab a hot beverage and settle in before reading this great new piece from Addy.

[blog] I Reviewed 50 Startup Pitch Decks. Here’s What They Keep Getting Wrong. If you keep struggling to land your internal proposal or external pitch, revisit your presentations. Good advice here.

[blog] Build a Blazing Fast API in Minutes with Hono and Cloud Run. I reflexively use Express whenever I build web stuff with Node, but I like how Hono looks.

[article] AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is ‘Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.’ Agree with the AWS CEO? Pretty sure that I do.

[article] Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately. Yowza, you might not be replacing junior engineers, but some are replacing those with fixed mindsets.

[article] Why Morgan Stanley open-sourced its app development tool. It’s great when open software comes from companies that solved a real internal need.

[blog] 101+ gen AI use cases with technical blueprints. Sorry not sorry for this monster blog post that shows the tech you can use to implement over a hundred AI patterns.

[article] Making AI Agents Work For You (and Your Team). Helpful talk from Hannah that explores how AI agent teams might work, and how they should approach AI in the workflow.

[blog] Don’t just speculate, investigate! Gemini Cloud Assist now offers root-cause analysis. AI doesn’t replace human thinking, but it can sure help it out. Here’s an SRE-like capability to quickly identify the root cause of a problem in your cloud system.

[blog] Caching Strategies for AI Agent Traffic. Caching is caching, but the patterns you apply can evolve. And it looks like AI agents will force us to shift our thinking.

[article] 6 Caching Strategies: Latency vs. Complexity Tradeoffs. More on caching. These are traditional patterns that have nothing to do with AI.

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Back in the saddle after a couple of days in Texas. Today’s reading list has some good hype-busting content about AI, and also some useful advice in a handful of areas.

[blog] Here’s which Google AI developer tool to use for each situation. New, from me. Here’s my take on how to choose from the handful of AI tools we offer. Let me know what you think of the heuristics here!

[blog] The problem with Claude Code and Cursor: The AI Coding “Death Spiral.” Yes, simple is good. Don’t tackle giant efforts at once. Deconstruct what you want from the AI tool, and don’t try to be so clever.

[article] 87% of game developers are using AI agents in their workflows, says new survey. I’ve noticed that the gaming industry is often quick to jump on new innovations. Here’s another example.

[blog] How much energy does Google’s AI use? We did the math. I’m fairly sure this data will surprise you. It surprised me.

[article] Managing AI coding assistants without losing control. Are you think of AI tools as shortcuts, or enhancers? Be intentional about what you want to use them for.

[article] How Reddit Delivers Notifications to Tens of Millions of Users. Always fun to learn how other people solve big tech challenges.

[blog] Build Day 0: Engineering the Virtual CTO Advisor with Google Cloud Vertex AI. Keith is building a “virtual advisor” and sharing what he’s been learning. Good pragmatic stuff. Same with this new post on prompt management.

[blog] Beyond guardrails: A taxonomy of platform engineering control mechanisms. Good post that helps us use the correct term for the situation.

[blog] Introducing ‘Gemini for Government’: Supporting the U.S. Government’s Transformation with AI. A ton of capabilities, at a bargain price. I’m glad to see governmental groups getting easier access to leading tech.

[article] The Hidden Cost of AI Pilots that Never Scale. Even quick pilots can accidentally have long-term costs. Think wisely about what investments you need to make, and what your “carrying costs” might be.

[article] GitHub’s Fall: Microsoft’s AI Takeover, Developer Betrayal, and the Next Fight for Digital Sovereignty. Yikes, quite a spicy take. But I do think this organizational change with GitHub and Microsoft has larger ramifications than most people think.

[blog] Build Better Agents in Java Than Python: Embabel vs Pydantic AI. Java devs have some of the best non-Python options for building agents.

[article] All the Biggest Announcements From This Year’s ‘Made by Google.’ The format yesterday was … interesting. I enjoyed parts of it, for sure. Here’s our summary of the news.

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