Don't Know Jack

Daily cloud literacy for the business professional.

You're in. First concept arrives tomorrow morning. 🌿

5
Minutes daily
0
Jargon unexplained
Who it's for

You nodded. So did everyone else.

Don't Know Jack is for the business professionals who make cloud decisions.

📋
Project Managers
Who constantly write down technical terms to look up later. Who brief engineering teams on features and receive estimates that feel arbitrary.
📊
Finance leads
Who approve cloud deployments every month without fully understanding the long-term costing implications.
🏢
Executives
Who signed off on the security strategy and are not entirely sure what they agreed to. Who want to ask better questions.
🔍
Business analysts
Who work alongside cloud engineering teams daily and want to contribute to the technical conversation rather than merely observe.
🎯
Product owners
Who brief engineers on features and want to understand why the deployments are so complicated.
💡
Anyone who nodded
Who typed a technical term into a search engine, or AI, at 11pm and got a four-page summary that assumed they already knew many other technical terms.
How it works

Five minutes.
One concept.
Every day.

One email at noon. Everything you need to know Jack.

01
Your inbox
Read the concept

One cloud concept explained in plain language. Real analogies. Business consequences first. Zero jargon left unexplained.

02
Same email
Answer the question

Four options. Intent words highlighted so you know what the question is actually testing. Click your answer directly from the email.

03
Instantly — Rationale
Understand why

Not just what is correct. Why every wrong answer is wrong, and the specific condition under which each one would have been right. Flip cards show you what one word change does to the whole answer. The real learning starts here.

What you get

Today's Concept

This is what lands in your inbox every day at noon.

Daily · 12pm

  • ✓One cloud concept explained in plain language
  • ✓A question that tests whether you understood it
  • ✓The correct answer — and why every wrong answer is wrong
  • ✓Flip cards — what one word change does to the answer
  • ✓XP and streak tracking

Sunday · 5pm

✓A link to Selena's Crossword — built from the week's article

Tuesday · Substack

✓The week's narrative article — Selena, Bart, JJ, and Raja

Security · Identity
Day 13
Why You Want To Be A Root User
The master key to your AWS account. One per account. No restrictions. Should almost never be used. Almost certainly being used constantly.

Every AWS account has exactly one root user. One. Not one per team. Not one per department. One per account.

The root user can do absolutely everything inside that account. Delete every server. Wipe every database. Cancel the account entirely. No exceptions. No restrictions. No permissions required.

AWS's own advice is to create it, lock it in a metaphorical drawer, and almost never use it. Here's what actually happens instead.

Five minutes. That's all it takes.
Read more →

Your engineering team mentions the root user credentials were "set up when we first created the account." Nobody can remember who created the account. That was four years ago. Two people have left since then.

What is the MOST IMPORTANT first step?
Words of intent
most important first step
A
Create a new AWS account and start fresh
B
Identify who holds the root credentials and rotate them immediately
C
Ask the engineering team to document all current users
D
Enable billing alerts to monitor unusual activity

You started not knowing Jack.

Five minutes a day. One concept. Plain language. No jargon left unexplained. Starting tomorrow morning.

You're in. See you tomorrow morning. 🌿

You just knew a little more Jack than you did five minutes ago.
Five minutes. That's all it takes.