Being a technical layperson has advantages in life and certainly in work, assuming you work in a field that leverages technology. Having the ability to converse with technical people (developers, engineers, electricians, technical support reps and so on) means that you can ask better questions, converse in a more “native language” with the person, and perhaps best of all, you can act as a translation layer with less technical people. I have found many technical people are not great at explaining concepts or their field to laypeople. Being a good communicator, to say nothing of being an engaging communicator is a skill and craft in and of itself. Masters of anything know a thing better than most AND can communicate it in an exciting way for a broad audience.

So it’s pretty remarkable when you find experts who take the time to put together explanations. I ran across Abhinav Upadhyay today from his post, “What Every Developer Should Know About GPU Computing”, which is an excellent example given the increasing importance of GPUs, mainly due to artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning.