Explain Like I'm Human

Who is this blog for?

Anyone! I intentionally try to make the content of each entry accessible to a wide variety of audiences. Whether you just heard your senior engineer co-worker reference a term you’ve never heard and were too afraid to ask for clarification or whether you’re a seasoned engineer who needs a refresher on a topic, this blog is for you.

Why ELIH?

There’s a vast world of software engineering concepts and there’s a vast world or resources to learn about those concepts. I’ve found many resources to be either hyper-specific or hyper-generic. With this blog, my goal is to extract useful tidbits from documentation, break down complex concepts, and consolidate the vast world of technical knowledge into approachable, digestible morsels.

You could easily go to ChatGPT or any other generative AI resource and get a perfectly good explanation to any of these topics but as someone who has years of experience in the pre-AI world, grappling with contextualizing and conceptualizing software concepts in my human brain, I think there is still a place for human-generated explanations.

About the Author

Hello! And thanks for visiting my blog. I’m Molly.

I’ve always felt like an imposter in the software engineering world. I didn’t grow up writing code or even playing video games. I have a degree in Environmental Health Science - not Computer Science. But I found I liked tinkering with code enough that I found myself at a software bootcamp after college. Even still, I spend my free time outdoors or painting and I don’t believe that humans should look at computer screens for 8+ hours a day. Thinking like a computer does NOT come naturally or easily to me, especially on days when my right brain is feeling particularly active or it’s 75 and sunny outside. And yet, for some reason, I chose a career as a software engineer because most days, I really enjoy it.

…And then there are the days like my first day on my first team as a front end engineer where I heard the terms “server-side rendering” and “headless CMS” multiple times and felt like a complete imposter because I had no clue what it meant. These are not terms you come to know while running around the mountains or studying petri dishes of microorganisms (my respective childhood and college experiences). And even after a quick side-Google (that’s my term for whenever I have to sneakily look something up during a meeting or pair programming session…something that happens daily), I still couldn’t quickly conceptualize or contextualize how it fit into other aspects of web development. I’ve spent many hours outside of work reading and filling in gaps in my knowledge and each post in this blog was created out of necessity for my own learning. I hope that it can be of help to you too!