Sallie Mae

#FinancialRisk #Risk #RiskManagement #SERC

Sharing with the community. It's more than just "patch faster" and important to keep focus on the other aspects of cyber hygiene and best practices as you can see from this list. Great leadership from Valerie Abend and the FS-ISAC team and membership here!

I am excited to announce that I have started my mortgage lending journey with Rate! Let's grab coffee, catch up, and see what I can do to assist you with the most important and exciting venture of your life!

Most people use ChatGPT daily but have no idea what's happening inside it. Here's how LLMs actually work It all starts with text broken into tokens, not words. Tokens. "unhappy" = ["un", "happy"]. Everything you type gets chopped into tiny pieces first. Each token gets converted into a number. Computers don't read words. They read math. Every token becomes a vector — a list of numbers that captures its meaning. "King" and "Queen" end up mathematically close. "King" and "Pizza" don't. Attention mechanism — the real magic The model looks at every token and asks: "Which other tokens in this sentence should I pay attention to?" In "The Java server crashed because it was overloaded" — it knows "it" refers to "server", not "Java". That's attention. That's what makes it feel intelligent. Layers upon layers of pattern recognition A model like GPT-4 has 96 of these layers. Each layer refines the understanding deeper. By the last layer, it's not reading words anymore — it's reasoning about concepts. Then it predicts — one token at a time After all that processing, the model outputs ONE next token. Then repeats. Then repeats. Then repeats. That entire response you got? Generated one word at a time. It's not thinking. It's not conscious. It's an extraordinarily sophisticated pattern completion. But here's the wild part — somewhere between the math and the layers, something that looks a lot like understanding emerges. We built it. We still don't fully understand it. That's what makes this era the most exciting time to be in tech.

After 10 years building Java full-stack applications, here's the one thing I wish I knew earlier about REST API design: A well-designed API is not just about making things work. It's about making things last. Early in my career, I focused on getting the response out fast. Today, I focus on: → Consistent naming conventions that any developer can understand on day one → Proper use of HTTP status codes (not everything is a 200 OK 😄) → Versioning your APIs from the start — not as an afterthought → Designing for the consumer, not for your database schema → Keeping business logic out of controllers — that's what your service layer is for Backend design is where good software starts. If your API is clean, everything built on top of it becomes easier to maintain, scale, and hand off to a team. 10 years in, I'm still learning — but these principles have never let me down. What's the one REST API lesson that changed how you build? Drop it in the comments #Java #SpringBoot #BackendDevelopment #RESTApi #SoftwareEngineering #FullStackDeveloper #TechInsights

When we launched Backpack Media, the vision was clear: build something differentiated that truly adds value to students and families at a pivotal life stage. Today, we’re taking another meaningful step forward. We’ve partnered with Kargo to bring predictive life-stage intelligence into the Backpack Media ecosystem. It unlocks a new level of relevance, precision, and impact for brands looking to connect with this audience in the right moment, with the right message. This is exactly where we believed this could go. Still early. Team’s still cooking. Marco Steinsieck Libby Dondero Kargo

Fantastic early career opportunities with one of the best with one of the best CMO’s i know.