Tech Bytes Recap: Intro to the Technology Stack

By Kartik Jain

Last Spring, Judy Pham and I launched a new Tech Education initiative called Tech Bytes. Tech Bytes are peer-led technical skills-building workshops featuring bite-sized topics that can be taught in 1 hour. Instructors are current UCLA Anderson students who have prior experience in technology roles and are passionate about sharing knowledge to help their peers break into tech.

In our first Tech Bytes of the 2018-2019 school year, Jon Helman (FTMBA 2020) introduced students to the technology stack, using Tinder as a clarifying example. Since many product decisions require a baseline understanding of the product's tech stack, this edition of Tech Bytes was designed to be especially helpful for students exploring careers in product management or strategy at companies with web, mobile, or cloud-enabled applications.

Jon began by describing the various technological components that enable an iPhone app to run. Then he explained step-by-step how the client app communicates with the server when two users swipe and match. Finally, Jon tied it all together by discussing examples of hypothetical technical challenges that a Tinder product leader may face in the real world, and explained how to tackle the problems using the new concepts covered in the session.

Our next Tech Bytes, All About APIs, will be held on Thursday, January 24th at 11:30am. AnderTech members can register using CampusGroups.

Future Tech Bytes will be announced on the website calendar, in CampusGroups, and in the Andertech WHAT newsletter! We look forward to seeing you at our events!

If you are interested in teaching a Tech Bytes workshop or have workshop topic suggestions, please reach out to AnderTech’s Tech Education team: Kartik Jain, Judy Pham, Melissa Wong, and Jonathan Helman.