I am bad at explaining to software people what an FPGA is and I get worse every day.

Bad approach 1: Intro to electricity. "Know those green board things in your computer? Those are called PCBs. The little bits stuck to them are called chips. There are CPU chips, RAM chips... No your hard drive is not a chip. Have you ever opened your computer before?"

Bad approach 2: Bad metaphors. "FPGAs are like a box of Legos that you can programmatically assemble to build things like processors and peripherals."

Bad approach 3: walk through history of obsolete technologies. "So there uses to be these chips called 7400 chips, well there still are and they only performed functions like AND, OR, NOT..."

Bad approach 4: Elaborate use cases: "imagine you are using an Arduino to talk to these sensors to measure something but there's like twenty sensors and they all use serial ports and you need to talk to all twenty at the same time and buying twenty arduinos is out of the question

Bad approach 5: Walk through acronym. "Field Programmable Gate Array. Field programmable means you can program it. But not like a computer even though a computer is also field programmable. Gate Array means... No not Gatorade. Gate. Array. It's an array of logic gates"