Practical AI
Seeing beyond the scan in neuroimaging
In this episode, we explore the intersection of AI, machine learning, and healthcare through the lens of neuroimaging and epilepsy diagnosis. Dr. Gavin Winston shares insights from his work using MRI data and machine learning to uncover subtle abnormalities in brain function. We discuss the cultural and ethical barriers to AI adoption in medicine, how predictive data analysis could transform the diagnostic workflow, and what the future holds for medical imaging in a world increasingly shaped by intelligent systems.Featuring:Gavin Winston – LinkedIn, WebsiteChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:Detection of Epileptogenic Focal Cortical Dysplasia Using Graph Neural Networks: A MELD StudyMachine Learning in Neuroimaging across DisciplinesAutomated and Interpretable Detection of Hippocampal Sclerosis in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: AID-HSLiterature review and protocol for a prospective multicentre cohort study on multimodal prediction of seizure recurrence after unprovoked first seizureDeep learning in neuroimaging of epilepsyNon-parametric combination of multimodal MRI for lesion detection in focal epilepsyDetection of covert lesions in focal epilepsy using computational analysis of multimodal magnetic resonance imaging data
Open source AI to tackle your backlog
Vibe coding, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted pull requests? In this episode, Daniel and Chris chat with Robert Brennan and Graham Neubig of All Hands AI about how AI is transforming software development—from senior engineer productivity to open source agents that address GitHub issues. They dive into trust, tooling, collaboration, and what it means to build software in the era of AI agents. Whether you're coding from your laptop or your phone on a morning walk, the future is hands-free (and All Hands).Featuring:Robert Brennan – LinkedIn, XGraham Neubig – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:All HandsAll Hands on GitHubAll Hands on Hugging Face
Orchestrating agents, APIs, and MCP servers
In this episode, Daniel sits down with Pavel Veller, EPAM’s Chief Technologist, to explore the practical challenges of orchestrating many AI agents and managing connections to disparate systems/tools. Pavel shares insights from his hands-on work with agentic architectures and internal tools like "DIAL". Pavel also helps us understand things like MCP servers and why connecting assistants via APIs is easy—but making them useful is hard. Featuring:Pavel Veller – LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:EPAMDIALSWE-bench results
Software and hardware acceleration with Groq
How do you enable AI acceleration (at both the hardware and software layers) that stays ahead of rapid industry shifts? In this episode, Dhananjay Singh from Groq dives into the evolving landscape of AI inference and acceleration. We explore how Groq optimizes the serving layer, adapts to industry shifts, and supports emerging model architectures. Featuring:Dhananjay Singh – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:GroqSponsors:Augment Code - Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates.
AI-assisted coding with GitHub's COO
Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub, joins the hosts to discuss the evolving role of AI in software development, GitHub Copilot’s impact, and the challenges of AI-assisted coding. The conversation covers licensing concerns, ethical considerations, and how developers can navigate these complexities. Kyle also shares his vision for ambient AI, which seamlessly integrates into workflows to enhance productivity and innovation, shaping the future of developer tools. Featuring:Kyle Daigle – LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XSponsors:Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products.
Optimizing for efficiency with IBM’s Granite
We often judge AI models by leaderboard scores, but what if efficiency matters more? Kate Soule from IBM joins us to discuss how Granite AI is rethinking AI at the edge—breaking tasks into smaller, efficient components and co-designing models with hardware. She also shares why AI should prioritize efficiency frontiers over incremental benchmark gains and how seamless model routing can optimize performance. Featuring:Kate Soule – LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:IBM GraniteIBM Granite on Hugging FaceIBM Expands Granite Model Family with New Multi-Modal and Reasoning AI Built for the Enterprise
Build a workspace of AI agents
How can every single person build a personal AI protégé and then accumulate (and share) a host of other assistants? In this episode, we dive into the world of no-code AI with Scott Meyer from Chipp.ai. We discuss AI tooling for people that can't code, the cultural shift that needs to happen for widespread AI adoption in businesses, and the predicted growth trajectory of AI assistant that you can own.Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XScott Meyer - LinkedIn, XSponsors:Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products.Show Notes:Chipp.aiChipp.ai's Discord
GenAI hot takes and bad use cases
It seems like all we hear about are the great use cases for GenAI, but where should you NOT be using the technology? On this episode Chris and Daniel share their hot takes and bad use cases. Some may surprise you!Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Tool calling and agents
It seems like everyone is uses the term “agent” differently these days. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dig into the details of tool calling and its connection to agents. They help clarify how LLMs can “talk to” and “interact with” other systems like databases, APIs, web apps, etc. Along the way they share related learning resources.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:smolagentsHugging Face agents courseSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Deep-dive into DeepSeek
There is crazy hype and a lot of confusion related to DeepSeek’s latest model DeepSeek R1. The products provided by DeepSeek (their version of a ChatGPT-like app) has exploded in popularity. However, ties to China have raised privacy and geopolitical concerns. In this episode, Chris and Daniel cut through the hype to talk about the model, privacy implications, running DeepSeek models securely, and what this signals for open models in 2025.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Daniel’s blog post on DeepSeekDeepSeek R1 on Hugging FaceDeepSeekSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Video generation with realistic motion
We seem to be experiencing a surge of video generation tools, models, and applications. However, video generation models generally struggle with some basic physics, like realistic walking motion. This leaves some generated videos lacking true motion with disappointing, simplistic panning camera views. Genmo is focused on the motion side of video generation and has released some of the best open models. Paras joins us to discuss video generation and their journey at Genmo.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. Featuring:Paras Jain – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:GenmoSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Mozart to Megadeth at CHRP
Daniel and Chris groove with Jeff Smith, Founder and CEO at CHRP.ai. Jeff describes how CHRP anonymously analyzes emotional wellness data, derived from employees’ music preferences, giving HR leaders actionable insights to improve productivity, retention, and overall morale. By monitoring key trends and identifying shifts in emotional health across teams, CHRP.ai enables proactive decisions to ensure employees feel supported and engaged.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Shopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalaiEight Sleep – Up to $600 off Pod 4 Ultra — Go to eightsleep.com/changelog and use the code CHANGELOG. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it (we love ours). Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. DeleteMe – DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Featuring:Jeff Smith – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:CHRP | WebsiteMyCHRPCHRP | InstagramCHRP | LinkedInSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Sidekick is an AI Shopify expert
Today, Chris explores Shopify Magic and other AI offerings with Mike Tamir, Distinguished ML Engineer and Head of Machine Learning, and Matt Colyer, Director of Product Management for Sidekick. They talk about how Shopify uses generative AI and LLMs to enhance their products, and they take a deeper dive into Sidekick, a first-of-its-kind, AI-enabled commerce assistant that understands a merchant’s business (products, orders, customers) and has been trained to know all about Shopify.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai. Eight Sleep – Up to $600 off Pod 4 Ultra — Go to eightsleep.com/changelog and use the code CHANGELOG. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it (we love ours). Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Featuring:Mike Tamir – LinkedInMatt Colyer – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:ShopifyShopify’s Winter Edition ’25Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Full-duplex, real-time dialogue with Kyutai
Kyutai, an open science research lab, made headlines over the summer when they released their real-time speech-to-speech AI assistant (beating OpenAI to market with their teased GPT-driven speech-to-speech functionality). Alex from Kyutai joins us in this episode to discuss the research lab, their recent Moshi models, and what might be coming next from the lab. Along the way we discuss small models and the AI ecosystem in France.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai. WorkOS – AuthKit offers 1,000,000 monthly active users (MAU) free — The world’s best login box, powered by WorkOS + Radix. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.comFeaturing:Alexandre Défossez – Website, GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:KyutaiKyutai on GitHubKyutai on Hugging FaceSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Clones, commerce & campaigns
Chris and Daniel dive into what Trump’s impending second term could mean for AI companies, model developers, and regulators, unpacking the potential shifts in policy and innovation. Next, they discuss the latest models, like Qwen, that blur the performance gap between open and closed systems. Finally, they explore new AI tools for meeting clones and AI-driven commerce, sparking a conversation about the balance between digital convenience and fostering genuine human connections.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:WorkOS – AuthKit offers 1,000,000 monthly active users (MAU) free — The world’s best login box, powered by WorkOS + Radix. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.comNotion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelogFeaturing:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:New Models Qwen2.5 Alibaba’s Qwen AI ModelQwen2.5 Turbo Reads Ten Novels in One MinuteDeepSeek DeepSeek API Docs UpdateFLUX Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.1-dev on Hugging FaceOuteTTS OuteTTS 0.1 - 350M BlogOuteTTS 0.2 - 500M BlogSmol TTS Update on LinkedInSmolLVM SmolLVM Updates on LinkedInWhat Donald Trump’s Win Means for AIPractical AI Podcast: Episode 244GetPickle.aiDocling Docling Paper on arXivDocling GitHub RepositoryRed Hat Blog on DoclingLinkedIn Post on PDF Table ExtractionHugging Face Blog on Observers SDKAI and Commerce Stripe Blog: Adding Payments to Agentic WorkflowsLinkedIn Announcement: Payments Integration SDKSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
scikit-learn & data science you own
We are at GenAI saturation, so let’s talk about scikit-learn, a long time favorite for data scientists building classifiers, time series analyzers, dimensionality reducers, and more! Scikit-learn is deployed across industry and driving a significant portion of the “AI” that is actually in production. :probabl is a new kind of company that is stewarding this project along with a variety of other open source projects. Yann Lechelle and Guillaume Lemaitre share some of the vision behind the company and talk about the future of scikit-learn!Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai. WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.comShopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalaiFeaturing:Yann Lechelle – LinkedInGuillaume Lemaitre – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes::probabl.TechCrunch: Probabl is a new AI company built around popular library scikit-learnscikit-learnSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Creating tested, reliable AI applications
It can be frustrating to get an AI application working amazingly well 80% of the time and failing miserably the other 20%. How can you close the gap and create something that you rely on? Chris and Daniel talk through this process, behavior testing, and the flow from prototype to production in this episode. They also talk a bit about the apparent slow down in the release of frontier models.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai. Eight Sleep – Up to $600 off Pod 4 Ultra Go to eightsleep.com/changelog and use the code CHANGELOG. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it (we love ours). Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:MLOps Community “Agents in Production” eventSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
AI is changing the cybersecurity threat landscape
This week, Chris is joined by Gregory Richardson, Vice President and Global Advisory CISO at BlackBerry, and Ismael Valenzuela, Vice President of Threat Research & Intelligence at BlackBerry. They address how AI is changing the threat landscape, why human defenders remain a key part of our cyber defenses, and the explain the AI standoff between cyber threat actors and cyber defenders.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Eight Sleep – Take your sleep and recovery to the next level. Go to eightsleep.com/PRACTICALAI and use the code PRACTICALAI to get $350 off your very own Pod 4 Ultra. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it. Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Featuring:Gregory Richardson – LinkedInIsmael Valenzuela – GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:The AI Standoff: Attackers vs. Defenders | Blackberry BlogBlackberrySomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The path towards trustworthy AI
Elham Tabassi, the Chief AI Advisor at the U.S. National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), joins Chris for an enlightening discussion about the path towards trustworthy AI. Together they explore NIST’s ‘AI Risk Management Framework’ (AI RMF) within the context of the White House’s ‘Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence’.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Timescale – Real-time analytics on Postgres, seriously fast. Over 3 million Timescale databases power loT, sensors, Al, dev tools, crypto, and finance apps — all on Postgres. Postgres, for everything. Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelogDeleteMe – DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Featuring:Elham Tabassi – Website, LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:Elham Tabassi | NISTElham Tabassi | TIME 100 / AINIST Trustworthy & Responsible AI Resource CenterNIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF)NIST Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0) (PDF)NIST AI RMF PlaybookNIST AI RMF DevelopmentNIST AI Risk Management Framework - EngageNIST Risk Management Framework Aims to Improve Trustworthiness of Artificial IntelligenceWhite House Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial IntelligenceSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Big data is dead, analytics is alive
We are on the other side of “big data” hype, but what is the future of analytics and how does AI fit in? Till and Adithya from MotherDuck join us to discuss why DuckDB is taking the analytics and AI world by storm. We dive into what makes DuckDB, a free, in-process SQL OLAP database management system, unique including its ability to execute lighting fast analytics queries against a variety of data sources, even on your laptop! Along the way we dig into the intersections with AI, such as text-to-sql, vector search, and AI-driven SQL query correction.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Timescale – Real-time analytics on Postgres, seriously fast. Over 3 million Timescale databases power loT, sensors, Al, dev tools, crypto, and finance apps — all on Postgres. Postgres, for everything. Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Featuring:Till Döhmen – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdithya Krishnan – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:DuckDBMotherDuckIntroducing FixIt: an unreasonably effective AI error fixer for SQLSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Zak Andrews
I recently delved into the world of natural language processing models for text data and was blown away by the capabilities of the top three models I came across. The first model, BERT, provided me with incredibly accurate results and a seamless user experience and you can also explore more on https://frugalentrepreneur.com/top-3-natural-language-processing-models-for-text-data/ . The second model, GPT-3, amazed me with its ability to generate human-like text and understand context with ease. Lastly, the Transformer model left me in awe with its efficiency in processing large amounts of text data. Overall, my experience using these models was nothing short of transformative and I can't wait to explore more possibilities in the field of NLP.
Zak Andrews
Computer vision services have completely revolutionized the way we analyze visual data. The experience of using these services is nothing short of remarkable - the speed and accuracy with which they can identify objects, patterns, and even emotions in images is truly impressive, for more information visit https://www.whatsontech.com/how-computer-vision-services-enable-advanced-visual-analysis/ . The level of detail and insight provided by computer vision services is unparalleled, allowing for a deeper understanding of visual content than ever before. Overall, the use of computer vision services has greatly enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of visual analysis, making it an invaluable tool for a wide range of industries.
J T
PendDown: 100-200
James Martin
The concept of the Practical AI show sounds really interesting! It's so important to understand discussions around AI and related topics and apply them in real-world scenarios. If you're also interested in financial services, make sure to check out this link: https://myconveyancingmatters.co.uk/services/mortgage-product-transfer/ which provides helpful information on mortgage product transfers.
Russell Johnson
thanks for the episode, It really gave a good understanding of the different areas. sometimes it is good to dial back the technical to summarise the basics.