"Subscribed for quick summaries of topics. Saves time. Googling and Youtube and collating info isn't convenient."
— RB
Technically
Making practical sense of software and AI.
AI, tractors and the productivity paradox
Where are AI's productivity gains hiding? What kitted out Model Ts can teach us.
What’s an inference provider?
How the rise of open source AI models is fueling the growth of a new infrastructure category.
I Let Claude Code Autonomously Run Ads for a Month
Applying the Ralph Wiggum loop to things other than writing code.
Post-Training
Post-training turns a model from a knowledgeable blob that produces rambling answers, into a helpful assistant.
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the art of talking to AI models in a way that gets you the results you actually want.
Machine Learning
Machine Learning uses math to predict an output given an input
LLM
Large Language Models take in a prompt and generate text.
Databricks is apparently worth $100B. What do they even do?
What we should really be asking is “What does Databricks not do?”
What does Alteryx do?
Alteryx is a group of tools that helps business teams get insights out of their data, without needing to write any code.
Product analytics
Product analytics is the process of companies figuring out what users are actually doing in their product, with the goal of improving it.
The Modern Data Stack
The Modern Data Stack™ (MDS) is a new-ish set of tools that data teams are using to collect, transform, explore, and make use of their company’s data.
OpenAI
OpenAI is the most popular provider of generative AI models like GPT-4.
Databricks
Databricks sells a data science and analytics platform built on top of an open source package called Apache Spark.
Query
A query is how talk to your database.
SQL
SQL, or structured query language, is a type of programming language for working with databases.
Elastic
Elasticsearch is a popular open source database for storing and searching unstructured data.
Confluent
Apache Kafka is a framework for streaming real time data, and Confluent offers Kafka as a managed service.
What's a Package Manager?
And why are AI labs buying them up?
A Beginner’s Guide to Bring Your Own Cloud
The profitable but challenging deployment model sweeping the nation.
What's documentation?
How companies like Stripe win by writing better product docs, and where platforms like GitBook can help.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is a loose term that developers use to refer to the lower level components that hold up an application.
Object Oriented
Some programming languages are object oriented, which means that they’re centered around the concept of an object.
AWS
AWS is the premier cloud provider - they sell the infrastructure building blocks to build modern apps.
New Relic
New Relic is observability software: teams use it to monitor the performance of their apps and infrastructure.
VPN
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) lets you route your internet access through a specialized server that keeps your sensitive information private.
Tokenization
Tokenization is one of the ways that backends protect sensitive information, like credit cards or social security numbers.
Okta
Okta is an enterprise-focused identity provider: they take care of managing usernames, passwords, and permissions.
Snyk
Snyk helps developers make sure that the code they're writing is secure.
"Technically has allowed me better bridge the gap between user problems and how our system works under the hood."
— Adelaide Hallowell
Recent
What is Next.js?Free
The web framework your next vibe-coded app will probably be built in.
Justin GageWhat's a Package Manager?
And why are AI labs buying them up?
Will RaphaelsonAI, tractors and the productivity paradoxFree
Where are AI's productivity gains hiding? What kitted out Model Ts can teach us.
Sachin BennyWhen not to vibe codeFree
Should I ship something myself, or call in engineering help?
Sarah Krasnik Bedell
I Let Claude Code Autonomously Run Ads for a MonthFree
Applying the Ralph Wiggum loop to things other than writing code.
A Beginner’s Guide to Bring Your Own Cloud
The profitable but challenging deployment model sweeping the nation.
Will Raphaelson
How AI content detectors workFree
Learn how AI detectors work
Christy BieberWhat their products actually do and why they're so valuable.
AlgoliaConfluentOktaSnykQuick explanations of the concepts you see every day.
Video
Analyzing all 203 million trades on Kalshi
Kalshi just raised a new round at an $11B valuation. How much revenue does their prediction market really make?
Sam Schneider
Relationships are the moat
What's the forward deployed engineer role, and why is every startup hiring them?
Sung Won Chung
Learning Tracks
Curated collections of foundational articles to guide you through the basics of getting more technical at work.
AI, it's not that complicated ↗
How to understand and work effectively with AI and ML models and products.
- How do Large Language Models work?
Breaking down what ChatGPT and others are doing under the hood
- What's RLHF?
How AI models learned to stop being weird and start being helpful.
- What's GPT-3?
GPT-3 is a Machine Learning model that generates text.
- What’s a data science notebook?
Data Science Notebooks help data teams explore data with code.
Analyzing Software Companies ↗
The products and business models of leading software companies.
- Databricks is apparently worth $100B. What do they even do?
What we should really be asking is “What does Databricks not do?”
- What does Snowflake do?
Snowflake sells a powerful cloud data warehouse for analytics and data science teams.
- What does OpenAI do?
OpenAI is the most popular provider of generative AI models like GPT-4.
- What does dbt do?
dbt (no capitals) is a tool for transforming and organizing data in your warehouse.
Building Software Products ↗
How to make positive contributions to your product roadmap.
- The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering
Engineering and code basics that can make you a better PM to work with.
- What's code?
Code is step by step directions, but for computers.
- What's the internet?
A network of computers all connected to each other and sharing information.
- What's cloud?
Cloud is how companies rent infrastructure over the internet.
From Spreadsheets to Databases ↗
You've outgrown Excel, but you've got to put that data somewhere besides your parents basement.
- The Beginner's Guide to Databases
There are 300+ databases; what do they all do?
- SQL for the rest of us
If you’re not a data scientist but you have questions, you want to know SQL.
- The Excel User's Guide to Databases: Schemas
Why that schema change is going to take your engineers two weeks.
- The Excel User's Guide to Databases: Migrations
Why your feature is held up by a migration and why this is actually good.
How AI Models Actually Work ↗
How do these things actual work under the hood? What does it mean to train one? Is it more like going to the gym, studying for a test, or sleeping?
- What is Machine Learning?
How computers learn patterns from data — and why it’s the foundation for everything from stock prediction to ChatGPT.
- How do Large Language Models work?
Breaking down what ChatGPT and others are doing under the hood
- How do you train an AI model?
A deep dive into how models like ChatGPT get built.
- The beginner’s guide to AI model architectures
Unlike an onion, hopefully these neural network layers won't make you cry.
Working With Data Teams ↗
How to make positive contributions when working with analytics and data science teams.
- How do product analytics work?
Product analytics is how teams instrument and analyze data about their product usage.
- What your data team is using: the analytics stack
A deep dive into all of the tools that data teams use to do their work.
- SQL for the rest of us
If you’re not a data scientist but you have questions, you want to know SQL.
- What's the Modern Data Stack?
The new set of tools data teams use to get their jobs done.