Daily Reading List – April 18, 2025 (#536)
Did you have a productive week I did, and that makes it easier to take next Monday and Tuesday off to do a college visit with my son. Back here on Wednesday!
[article] From ‘catch up’ to ‘catch us’: How Google quietly took the lead in enterprise AI. Extensive report on what we’ve been doing and why we can hold onto this lead.
[article] 12 Factor Agents – Principles for building reliable LLM applications. I’m a sucker for lists like this. Here are some principles to consider for your AI apps.
[blog] Top 10 Platform Engineering Takeaways from PlatEngDay & KubeCon London 2025. Good take and expect to see more and more platform engineering advances in the years ahead.
[article] The Cursor Mirage. I have no doubt that “real” engineering teams are using tools like Cursor. That’s cool, but you’ve got to be clear-eyed about what you’re introducing.
[blog] Vibe Coding is for PMs. Sort of related to the previous item. Maybe these vibe coding tools are best for those sharing product requirements in new ways, versus doing actual production-grade work.
[blog] Spring cleaning with FinOps Hub 2.0. I can’t find a lot of developers who are obsessed about the cost of apps, but plenty of other folks keep an eye on spend. This looks like a nice upgrade.
[blog] A Behind-the-Scenes Look at How We Release the Spotify App (Part 1). Nice transparency from the Spotify team. You might now have millions of people waiting for your app upgrade, but there’s still something to learn here.
[blog] Image segmentation using Gemini 2.5. We’re not going to slow down our release cadence, but I’m glad folks are picking up “hidden” features that don’t get prime time coverage.
[article] Optimizing the 90%: Where Dev Time Really Gets Stuck. If devs are really only spending 10% of their time writing new code for new apps, there’s a lot of other places besides the IDE to optimize things.
[blog] Valkey Bloom Filter Detects Fraud (While Not Breaking the Bank). Wow, this membership check feature is cool. BTW, we just made our hosted Valkey service generally available.
[article] How to Tell Your Boss They’re Wrong—Tactfully. My team doesn’t seem to have much trouble here, but it’s a good reminder for both sides of the equation.
[blog] Teaching machines the language of biology: Scaling large language models for next-generation single-cell analysis. Our bodies are full of trillions of complex machines that we still don’t fully understand. AI can help with some of that.
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