"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.
Post-Training
Post-training turns a model from a knowledgeable blob that produces rambling answers, into a helpful assistant.
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
GPUs are specialized chips that do thousands of simple calculations simultaneously, making them perfect for AI training
Post-training
LLM post-training turns a model from a knowledgeable blob that produces rambling answers, into a helpful assistant.
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.
Reverse ETL
Reverse ETL is the process of syncing data from your data warehouse to your business tools like Salesforce and Hubspot.
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 (🤯).
Relational database
A relational database is sort of like Excel, but for developers: it’s how applications store and analyze data.
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.
Technical Debt
Technical debt is a term developers use to refer to all of the annoying thorns they need to deal with because of past decisions someone made in their codebase and architecture.
Microservices
Microservices (all hype aside) are a way of building your application as a series of small, interacting services instead of one giant bundle of code.
Heroku
Heroku was and is one of the first cloud platforms as a service (PaaS).
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.
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
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 RaphaelsonHow AI content detectors workFree
Learn how AI detectors work
Christy BieberWhat are prediction markets?Free
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?Free
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.
Cloudflare
DigitalOcean
DockerSegmentQuick 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.