You’ll find a lot of fun reads on this Friday. I’ve got a couple of projects in mind for the weekend as I prepare for a handful of in-person customer presentations next week in Sunnyvale.

[blog] Bring Back Ops Pride (https://charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/bring-back-ops-pride). Must-read piece, as always, from Charity. Ops != “toil” and the ability to build, run, and protect core services is superstar work.

[blog] MCP is Not the Problem, It’s your Server: Best Practices for Building MCP Servers (https://www.philschmid.de/mcp-best-practices). I mean, MCP has problems, but odds are its your implementation actually causing issues. Philipp has good advice here.

[blog] Agent Skills vs. Rules vs. Commands (https://www.builder.io/blog/agent-skills-rules-commands). I do believe this will get simpler, or exposed in higher order abstractions. But for now, learn the hard way.

[article] Tech hiring intentions are down despite demand for tech-oriented skills, report says (https://www.hrdive.com/news/tech-hiring-down-despite-demand-for-tech-oriented-skills/810050/). “Precision hiring” sounds about right. We’re not hiring generalists around here, and focused more on upskilling than restaffing.

[blog] Software Is Fine (https://shomik.substack.com/p/software-is-fine). Optimistic take about the software players in the market, and the continuous cycle of disruption. It’ll be fine.

[blog] To Build, or Not to Build: 3 (+1 New) Ways to Deploy Containers on Cloud Run (https://medium.com/google-cloud/to-build-or-not-to-build-3-1-new-ways-to-deploy-containers-on-cloud-run-260b79c880d1). Best app hosting service on the internet. Don’t fight me on this.

[article] When Strategy and Execution Fall Out of Sync (https://hbr.org/2026/01/when-strategy-and-execution-fall-out-of-sync). Useful advice. The strategy may be fine, but your pacing, existing skillset, and transparency may be off.

[blog] Miss the Window (https://medium.com/@tobrien/miss-the-window-27e648fcb7bb). Back to think slow and act fast. Keep execution cycles short so that you don’t end up building something nobody wants anymore.

[article] Drowning in AI slop, cURL ends bug bounties (https://thenewstack.io/drowning-in-ai-slop-reports-curl-ends-bug-bounties/). This is one of a few projects doing this now. It’s not that AI is doing bad work, but people using it lazily.

[article] How is Google using AI for internal code migrations? (https://rdel.substack.com/p/rdel-127-how-is-google-using-ai-for) Here’s a very effective use of AI. This post analyzes a public report that explained our work across four major code migrations.

[blog] 10-Minute Agentic RAG with the New Vector Search 2.0 and ADK (https://medium.com/google-cloud/10-minute-agentic-rag-with-the-new-vector-search-2-0-and-adk-655fff0bacac). I don’t think I knew what agentic RAG meant. Now I do, and this is a great example.

[blog] SLO out of the Box (https://medium.com/box-tech-blog/slo-out-of-the-box-311306fd511c). Adding Service Level Objectives within Box was a cultural challenge, not a technical one. Good post!

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