"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.
How do "computer use" agents work?
Why it's surprisingly challenging to let an LLM use a computer for you.
What's Harness Engineering?
If AI models are a commodity, the harness is the thing you want to own.
AI, tractors and the productivity paradox
Where are AI's productivity gains hiding? What kitted out Model Ts can teach us.
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
RLHF is the final training step that turns a knowledgeable but rambling AI into the helpful assistant you know and love.
Loss Function
A loss function is something you design that tells the model when its answers are right and when they're wrong.
Pre-training
When training an LLM, pre-training gives the model all the basic, foundational knowledge it needs to answer your prompts, by showing it lots and lots of examples of existing text from the internet.
Machine Learning
Machine Learning uses math to predict an output given an input
Databricks is apparently worth $100B. What do they even do?
What we should really be asking is “What does Databricks not do?”
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.
Linear Regression
Linear Regression is an old school statistical method for predicting outcomes from a series of numbers.
dbt Labs
dbt (no capitals) is a tool for transforming and organizing data in your warehouse.
OpenAI
OpenAI is the most popular provider of generative AI models like GPT-4.
What does Turbopuffer do?
And what's going on in the category formerly known as vector databases?
Why do developers choose different types of databases?
An intro to how companies like Elastic, MongoDB, Snowflake, Confluent and AWS compete.
Vector Database
A vector database is a place where developers store specially formatted data to use for machine learning and AI.
Schema
A schema is like the blueprint for a relational database.
Algolia
Algolia provides a set of tools that helps engineers build search functionality into their apps.
Elastic
Elasticsearch is a popular open source database for storing and searching unstructured data.
Software Eng for Vibe Coders: On Frontends + Backends
A new series to help non-engineers build products that can handle going viral.
What are code sandboxes?
Why coding agents need a safe place to play, just like we all do.
All about Infrastructure as Code
The deceptively simple text files that help you avoid huge mistakes when shipping software.
Script
A script is a term developers use to refer to a file of code that does something scoped and specific: to be distinguished from an app or a system, which is probably many files and does a lot more.
Terminal
The Terminal is the native way to talk to computers.
Zapier
Zapier helps business people make custom integrations between their favorite tools, without needing to write any code.
Twilio
Twilio makes a suite of products that helps you communicate with your customers via SMS, video, calls, and more.
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.
Snyk
Snyk helps developers make sure that the code they're writing is secure.
Okta
Okta is an enterprise-focused identity provider: they take care of managing usernames, passwords, and permissions.
"Technically has allowed me better bridge the gap between user problems and how our system works under the hood."
— Adelaide Hallowell
Recent
Software Eng for Vibe Coders: On Frontends + BackendsFree
A new series to help non-engineers build products that can handle going viral.
Justin GageHow do "computer use" agents work?Free
Why it's surprisingly challenging to let an LLM use a computer for you.
Tereza TizkovaWhat is Rust?Free
The fast, safe, super difficult to write programming language that’s finally getting its flowers.
Will RaphaelsonWhat's Harness Engineering?Free
If AI models are a commodity, the harness is the thing you want to own.
Paul Iusztin
What's Rust? Part 1: What is a Programming Language?Free
The fast, safe, super difficult to write programming language that’s finally getting its flowers.
Will Raphaelson
What are code sandboxes?
Why coding agents need a safe place to play, just like we all do.
Justin Gage
How my non-engineering team at Sentry learned to shipFree
We moved 2,500 pages out of our CMS with Claude Code and Git. 4 months ago, most of us hadn't written code.
Matt HendersonWhat their products actually do and why they're so valuable.
Elastic
Gitlab
Postman
SplunkQuick 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.