At my core, I’m a doer. I’m a hands-on builder. But like most tech leaders who move into leadership positions - you use more excel/powerpoint/email than actual code terminals.

Tech is moving so fast now - I need a quick way to get educated on just about anything. Coming into a new team - there is a lot of tech that I didn’t know. So I have developed a process for how to learn quickly. I don’t study. I play.

As part of a new app - our team was capturing voice and transcribing to text. The tech was Whisper model available on Hugging Face.

1. What is this thing

Simple questions to gemini - this is really obvious. But it surprises me still how many people ask questions in meetings that a single prompt could clear up. I don’t just ask about what it is - I try to go a bit deeper and ask about alternatives and risks to a given tech.

The tradeoff’s for Whisper are actually interesting - and the decisions for our use case do make sense being a batch oriented and on-device transcription.

2. Dig a little deeper

There are so many amazing tools at our fingertips - but one of my favorites is Google’s Notebook LM. I simply ask for a information about Whisper for voice transcription. Notebook finds 10 sources and imports them. Then the magic happens, I ask for an AI Podcast.

The podcast is usually about 15-20 minutes. Sometimes funny, sarcastic amazingly real sounding. The podcasters walk through the topic, calling out important points from specific articles. They will often say things like, “According to a PWC Paper - …” This sound byte version of knowledge helps me to make this sticky. It also maximizes my commute time.

3. Play with it

Finally - I use Google Colab to create a demo. There are a hundred ways to do this now, but I like using Colab as an old fashioned code editor. I give a prompt to Gemini inside of colab to make sure it downloads latest versions of everything - then explain what I am trying to learn about and ask it to be very verbose with comments - assume nothing about my knowledge.

The process doesn’t always go great - but this is the play. Even the frustration of things not working - is part of the process of learning. Getting API Keys to work, understanding how the model installs and updates, and finally getting the model to transcribe samples. It is awesome.

Once I see how things work - at a code level - I start playing with Vibe Coding tools - to build out more complete examples. For Whisper - I vibe coded a silly app - where I could speak into my computer about a meeting - and then scan the transcription for contacts and actions to record.

The point of all this - is getting deeper. The tools we have available now - make learning so much easier. Playing can be frustrating - but that friction is part of the learning.