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The Hidden Beauty of Databases: Explained for Non-Techies Like Never Before
(This article is an excerpt of Chapter 5 from the book "Tech Fluent CEO" — a new breakthrough book for non-technical people who want to build and lead digital companies.) In most system diagrams, a database is depicted as a cylinder (as shown in the figure) that just sits there as an opaque black box, simply storing data. (Looking forward to your fan letters for my award-winning drawing and calligraphy skills.) In reality – and you might laugh at me for saying this – modern database systems are so cool and sophisticated that I almost see them as living,…
November 2, 2022
Essays
The Non-Engineer’s Ultimate Guide to Software Technology
(Disclaimer: this essay is an excerpt from my book, Tech Fluent CEO — for "non-technical" founders and professionals who hate calling themselves that. You can get it here for free by paying with a tweet, or purchase it here. Also available on Amazon.) There’s a huge communication gap between “technical” and “non-technical” people in the industry, even in Silicon Valley. Non-technical professionals are constantly told that the path to “technical fluency” is through learning to write code or some other kind of intense education. That’s terrible advice. It's good to give it a try and see if you enjoy it,…
May 25, 2021
Essays
Explained Simply: How an AI program mastered the ancient game of Go
This is about AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s Go playing AI that shook the technology world in 2016 by defeating one of the best players in the world, Lee Sedol. Go is an ancient board game which has so many possible moves at each step that future positions are hard to predict — and therefore it requires strong intuition and abstract thinking to play. Because of this reason, it was believed that only humans could be good at playing Go. Most researchers thought that it would still take decades to build an AI which could think like that. In fact, I’m releasing this essay…
March 10, 2018
Essays
Explained Simply: How DeepMind taught AI to play video games
Google’s DeepMind is one of the world’s foremost AI research teams. They’re most famous for creating the AlphaGo player that beat South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. The key technology used to create the Go playing AI was Deep Reinforcement Learning. Space Invaders! Let’s go back 4 years, to when DeepMind first built an AI which could play Atari games from the 70s. Games like Breakout, Pong and Space Invaders. It was this research that led to AlphaGo, and to DeepMind being acquired by Google. Today we’re going to take that original research paper and break it down…
August 27, 2017
Essays
Everything about Self Driving Cars Explained for Non-Engineers
I promise you won’t have to use either Google or a dictionary while reading this. In this post I will teach you the core concepts about everything from “deep learning” to “computer vision”. Using dead simple English. You probably already know what self driving cars are and that they are considered the dope shit these days, so if you don’t mind I’m going to skip any high school essay-ish introduction. 🙂 But I’m not skipping my own introduction: Hi I’m Aman, I’m an engineer, and I have a low tolerance for unnecessarily “sophisticated” talk. I write essays on Medium to…
April 11, 2017
Essays
GitHub for Chimpanzees (and a short rant against scientists)
Even Nobel Laureates agree that scientific papers are headed towards jargonocalypse. <Rant> I am an engineer by education, and have therefore studied science a lot. Yet I have realised that I find it easier to read something written in Spanish, than most scientific papers written in English (and I’ve never even fucking learned Spanish). Do you know why scientific research papers are so hard to read? I’m going to be unfairly brutal here. Because the authors of these papers these days, the “global scientific community”, predominantly consists of people whose life depends on one thing: whether they can coat their…
November 19, 2016
Essays
The Gladiator Pit of Hardware Startups
Hint: It’s not in America or Europe. Earlier this week I watched an amazing documentary by Wired about the rise of Asia’s silicon valley hotspot in Shenzhen in China. This one small city, which came into prominence just two decades ago and doesn’t have a lot of history or culture of its own, is now the breeding ground for technology innovation in the East. Shenzhen is the crystal ball in which you can gaze at the future, even more than Silicon Valley. And the most fascinating thing about it is that this city breeds hardware innovation, not just software innovation.…
November 15, 2016
Essays
Google App Engine: Quick Tutorial for Dummies Like Me
(For Mac users) I’m an engineer. I hate most of the documentation I find on the internet. I guess developers write documentation for each other, which is a pretty understandable sentiment. And we use lingo that makes sense to our club. But unintentionally, often this super technical language keeps out beginners who are just taking an online course or reading a book and just want to get things done. I had a similar experience while trying to set up Google App Engine while taking Udacity’s Full-Stack Web Developer Nanodegree. Udacity makes it a point to not spoon-feed everything to students…
September 17, 2016
Essays
Here’s a tour of WeChat, the “greatest” mobile app in the world
When I arrived in China, I realized I was on WeChat all the time. I was using it in many different ways: Instant messaging A social network like Facebook, for sharing pictures/videos/links/etc Sending money to people Making audio and video calls over the internet Quickly exchanging files between my phone and desktop (Wechat’s desktop and web clients automatically create a “file transfer” conversation, just like any other conversation with a contact. By sending a file to this conversation, you instantly see it on the other end) As my personal visiting card (to share my contact details with anyone, I simply…
August 15, 2016