Should you learn how to program your own mutilthreaded server before starting to set up your first Google Ads campaign? Surely no. Does understanding how the HTTP protocol and Session management work will help you become better at managing your digital campaigns? I am pretty sure that yes. Because learning about it will give you the foundational knowledge that makes understanding complex abstractions later on easier (like third-party cookies role in performance measurement, DSP, ...) Starting from the abstractions obstructs your vision of the reality, obfuscating the bare mechanisms at play underneath. It constrains your creativity to the limits of the tool.
WordPress is not easy
WordPress isn’t easy. There, I said it. I’m willing to bet if you’ve spent any time using the software, you probably feel the same way. Even if you’re a WordPress expert, using the software is not without frustration. As a consultant, what I find even more frustrating, is the difficulty I have in recommending WordPress to a lot of new-to-the-web users or users with strict goals to launch their new business online. I’m mentoring an accelerator class and 90% of the students need to make their mark on the web. Sounds easy enough, but within a deluge of learning business legalese, accelerator students can’t come up for air to learn the best practices of WordPress too. Quite frankly, they shouldn’t have to. In the end, there’s simply too many moving parts for the newcomer to comprehend.
The interplay between machine learning and data minimization under the GDPR: the case of Google’s topics API
The rapid speed of digitalization and the continuous technological disruption have lead to different paradoxes and contradictions. With the widespread adop
21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google
Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.
Lecture 16 - How to Run a User Interview (Emmett Shear)
Is Misinformation More Open? A Study of robots.txt Gatekeeping on the Web
Web scraping, the automated process of extracting information from websites, has long played a foundational role in the Internet ecosystem (Gray, 1995). It supports services such as search engine indexing, price comparison tools, and competitive intelligence. More recently, it has become a core component in the development of large-scale generative AI models. These Large Language Models (LLMs) require enormous volumes of training data, often in the terabyte range (Kaplan et al., 2020; Lehane, 2025), and the public web remains a low-cost, attractive source. Major model developers, including those behind OpenAI’s Chat-GPT (OpenAI, 2025), Google’s Bard (now known as Gemini) & Vertex AI (Romain, Danielle, 2023), and Anthropic’s Claude (Romain, Danielle, 2025), openly acknowledge the use of web scraping to construct their training corpora (Abdin et al., 2024; Brown et al., 2020; Chowdhery et al., 2023; Grattafiori et al., 2024; Team et al., 2024; Touvron et al., 2023).
The End of Programming as We Know It
With the O’Reilly learning platform, you get the resources and guidance to keep your skills sharp and stay ahead. Try it free for up to 14 days.
Machine Learning | Google for Developers
New Research: Is an Ad-Supported Internet Feasible in Emerging Markets? | The Mozilla Blog
Fresh research conducted by Caribou Digital and funded by Mozilla explores digital advertising models in the Global South — whether they can succeed, and
Google’s Prompt API
No web standard should require you to agree to an advertising company’s “terms of use.”
AI may fatally wound web’s ad model, warns Tim Berners-Lee
Web inventor warns reliance on AI agents threatens multibillion-dollar revenues for Google and Meta
Building your own algorithm on Bluesky and AT Protocol with Graze
Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech
How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet.Algorithms, data
