The difference between providing “data” and providing “insights” (actually though) — WTF do data teams even do? The job of an engineering team is to build effective, scalable products according to spec. The job of a product team is to understand and build solutions for users. What’s the job of a data team? There’s no one or clear answer, which helps explain why the field is such…

The TL;DR — Plaid acts as an intermediary between apps (like Venmo) and your bank so that you can log in and share data securely. As more and more personal finance apps (think Robinhood, Venmo, Current, etc.) pop up, developers need ways to connect to and access your bank accounts That connection is…

Identity theft is not a joke, Jim — TL;DR Authentication is how the apps you use know that you are who you say you are: through something as simple as a password, or as complex as biometrics. Accessing your apps and data on the web relies on identity: only you should be able to see your stuff! The most…

Machine Learning has advanced — ThE eNd iS NeAr — The TL;DR GPT-3 is a Machine Learning model that generates text. You give it a bit of text related to what you’re trying to generate, and it does the rest. Machine Learning models let you make predictions based on past data, and generation (creating text) is a special case of predicting things …

Beware of marketers — The TL;DR Serverless is a catch-all term for apps and products that don’t require you to manage your own servers. Every app runs on a set of servers somewhere, and there’s high overhead involved in managing them Serverless just means that your app — or the infrastructure you pay for — doesn’t…

Don’t worry it’s not just for porn (not that there’s anything wrong with that) — The TL;DR A Virtual Private Network (VPN) lets you route your internet access through a specialized server that keeps your sensitive information private. Accessing the internet (sending requests to servers) directly reveals your IP address, and public WiFi networks can expose sensitive information like your passwords

This was probably a waste of my time — Why we’re even talking about this 7 months ago, at Haneda Airport near Tokyo (this is not a relevant detail), I had an idea about starting a newsletter that explained software engineering to people who aren’t software engineers. I tweeted about it (surprise), there was some interest, and so I got started. 7 months later, we’re…