31 articles · newest first
A quick definition of GraphQL: what it is, what it does, and why developers reach for it instead of plain REST.
A practical look at design thinking: where it comes from, what designers actually do when they reason through problems, and how it pairs with engineering work.
SaaS turned software from something you owned into something you rent. Here's what that actually means, why it took over, and what it changed about how products get built and sold.
A quick definition of the freemium pricing model, where it came from, and what happens when you bolt monetization onto a free product.
An honest look at why the sources you were handed don't actually support writing about product-led growth, and what to do about it.
A plain-English tour of RLHF: how human preferences get baked into a reward model, why it matters for LLMs, and the open questions about whose values end up encoded.
A quick, plain-English definition of Python: what it is, what makes it distinctive, and where it shows up beyond the usual laptop.
The strange, oddly effective practice of explaining your code to an inanimate object, and why it works better than most formal debugging tools you'll ever touch.
A friendly tour of computer vision: what it actually does, how it pulls meaning out of pixels, and where you'll find it showing up in the wild.
A friendly tour of how machines turn spoken words into text, why it's harder than it looks, and where the field is heading with self-supervised learning.
A quick tour of JavaScript: where it came from, what makes it tick, and why it runs most of the web.
A quick, grounded definition of TypeScript: what it is, where it came from, and why developers keep reaching for it.
A friendly tour of Git, the distributed version control system that quietly runs underneath nearly every software project you've ever used.
A quick rundown of Node.js: what it is, where it runs, who maintains it, and why developers keep reaching for it.
A short, plain-English definition of Docker containers: what they are, why they exist, and how they fit into the way software actually ships today.
A short, plain-English definition of Kubernetes: what it does, where it came from, and why people actually run it.
A friendly tour of microservice architecture: what it actually is, why teams move to it from monoliths, where it pays off, and where it bites back.
A quick tour of content delivery networks: what they are, why they exist, and where they're headed as the internet stretches into orbit.
A short reference on what a transformer is, how attention works, and why this architecture became the backbone of modern AI.
Embeddings turn words into vectors that capture meaning. Here's how they work, why they matter, and where they show up in real systems.
A practical look at how natural language became a programming interface, why it's harder than it sounds, and what separates a good prompt from a lucky one.
Fine-tuning takes a model that already knows something useful and nudges it toward a narrower job. Here's how it actually works, and why it became the default way to ship AI features.
A friendly tour of vector databases: what they store, why nearest-neighbor search matters, and where they fit in the modern AI stack.
A quick reference on MCP: what it is, where it came from, and why every major AI provider ended up adopting it.
A quick reference on what LLMs are, how they're trained and tuned, and how we measure whether they're any good.
REST is the architectural style that quietly powers most of the web. Here's what it actually means, where it came from, and why developers keep reaching for it.
RAG lets language models pull in outside information before answering, so they can work with fresh data, internal docs, or knowledge they were never trained on.
AI like ChatGPT works by predicting the next word, kind of like autocomplete, but way smarter. Here's the plain-English version of what's happening under the hood.
When you talk to an AI, three different models are running in sequence. Here's what each one does and why latency matters more than you think.
A real working chat app, end to end. JavaScript, no framework, ~50 lines. You'll get a feel for how requests, streaming, and prompts fit together.
Authenticate, send a chat request, stream a reply. Three steps. Copy-paste examples in JavaScript and Python.
