"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.
I Let Claude Code Autonomously Run Ads for a Month
Applying the Ralph Wiggum loop to things other than writing code.
How AI content detectors work
Learn how AI detectors work
What's a datacenter?
What actually goes on inside the buildings propping up the US economy.
Training Dataset
Training datasets are the examples you show an AI model so it can learn to recognize patterns and make predictions.
RAG
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a way to make LLMs like GPT-4 more accurate and personalized to your specific data
LLM
Large Language Models take in a prompt and generate text.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a Machine Learning model, created and maintained by OpenAI, that generates paragraphs of text in response to prompts.
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.
What's a Data Migration?
Data migration is about transferring information (data) from one place to another.
Data warehouse
A data warehouse is a special type of database designed for analytics instead of transactions.
Metric
When developers monitor their applications and infrastructure to make sure things run smoothly, they set up metrics to track specific points of performance: how fast an API request gets fulfilled, the percentage of requests that fail, or even what % of total processing capacity is a server using up.
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.
Migration
Migrations mean a lot of things in software, but they usually entail some sort of important change.
Production database
The largest category of databases – both in terms of number of available options and total market size – is production 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.
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.
Developers hate this one thing (all about code reviews)
A deep dive into why code reviews take so long, how AI tools like CodeRabbit are speeding them up, and what great teams do to ensure clean code.
Deploy
Deploying means updating the running version of your app with new code
Object Oriented
Some programming languages are object oriented, which means that they’re centered around the concept of an object.
Zapier
Zapier helps business people make custom integrations between their favorite tools, without needing to write any code.
Gitlab
GitLab is a giant tool for literally anything you'd want to do relating to building and deploying software.
Tokenization
Tokenization is one of the ways that backends protect sensitive information, like credit cards or social security numbers.
VPN
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) lets you route your internet access through a specialized server that keeps your sensitive information private.
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
A Beginner’s Guide to Bring Your Own Cloud
The profitable but challenging deployment model sweeping the nation.
Will RaphaelsonI Let Claude Code Autonomously Run Ads for a Month
Applying the Ralph Wiggum loop to things other than writing code.
How AI content detectors work
Learn how AI detectors work
Christy BieberWhat are prediction markets?
What are prediction markets and how much revenue is Kalshi really making?
Sam Schneider
What's a datacenter?
What actually goes on inside the buildings propping up the US economy.
Will Raphaelson
AI and the — em dash
Finally, an explanation for why AI models can't seem to quit them.
Christy BieberHow are companies using AI?
Enough surveys and corporate hand-waving. Let's answer the question by looking at usage data from an AI compute provider.
Kenny NingWhat their products actually do and why they're so valuable.
AWSConfluent
dbt Labs
PlaidQuick 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: the foundation for everything from stock price 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.