"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.
Inference
Inference is a fancy term that just means using an ML model that has already been trained.
Instructional Fine-tuning
Instructional fine-tuning is how you turn a pre-trained AI model – knowledgeable, but useless – into a helpful assistant that actually answers your questions.
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.
Training
Training is the process of creating and teaching an ML model how to do something.
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 lake
A Data Lake is an unstructured place to put data. It’s usually meant for long term storage and infrequent querying.
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.
Segment
Segment helps teams track their product and marketing data and send it to whichever tools it needs to go to.
Databricks
Databricks sells a data science and analytics platform built on top of an open source package called Apache Spark.
Metadata
Metadata is data about data (🤯).
Production database
The largest category of databases – both in terms of number of available options and total market size – is production databases.
MongoDB
MongoDB is a highly popular unstructured, NoSQL document database for powering your applications.
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.
Integration
Integrations are how two pieces of software talk to each other and share data
Production
Production is the live, ready, tested, public facing version of your app.
Postman
Postman is a suite of tools that helps developers build, test, and use internal and external API endpoints.
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is an independent infrastructure as a service provider; you can think of them as AWS or GCP, but for the people.
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
AI, 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 BedellWhat’s an inference provider?
How the rise of open source AI models is fueling the growth of a new infrastructure category.
Will RaphaelsonI Let Claude Code Autonomously Run Ads for a MonthFree
Applying the Ralph Wiggum loop to things other than writing code.
How AI content detectors workFree
Learn how AI detectors work
Christy Bieber
What are prediction markets?Free
What are prediction markets and how much revenue is Kalshi really making?
Sam Schneider
What's a Forward Deployed Engineer?Free
And why is every startup around following the Palantir model?
Sung Won ChungWhat their products actually do and why they're so valuable.
AlteryxMongoDB
Plaid
SentryQuick 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.