Month: July 2025

Episode overview: Bernard Laurendeau has a mission: to stop African business leaders from asking for "patient capital." The Ethiopian-French management consultant, now operating from Tokyo, believes this standard pitch fundamentally misunderstands how global investment works and fails African markets. It's a contrarian stance from someone who's spent 15 years advising Fortune 50 clients and building institutions across three continents. After co-founding Arifpay, Ethiopia's first licensed Payment System Operator, and serving as senior advisor to Ethiopia's jobs creation commission, Laurendeau has repositioned himself in Japan's corporate heartland with Laurendeau & Associates and Enkopa Lab. From his Tokyo base, Laurendeau delivers what he calls "execution horsepower" to both African governments and Japanese corporations seeking African market entry. His client portfolio spans Google and Cisco to UAE's Ministry of Finance, applying strategic frameworks honed at BNP Paribas to emerging market challenges. Key insights: - On financial sovereignty: Despite supporting fintech innovation, Laurendeau advocates fiercely for African countries maintaining control over their financial services infrastructure. - On Japanese business culture: Japanese organisations bring uncompromising quality standards to everything—"there's no such thing as downgrading." Whilst this limits their market share compared to Chinese competitors offering multiple price points, it creates superior knowledge transfer opportunities for African partners. - On data-driven decisions: Investors don't want to "think long-term"—they want confidence in their decisions. Laurendeau's experience with big data analytics in Silicon Valley informs his approach to providing real-time, actionable intelligence rather than outdated World Bank reports. - On innovation vs infrastructure: African entrepreneurs risk becoming "lazy" by chasing trendy technologies whilst neglecting "boring" fundamentals - On institutional building: African countries need people willing to do "Gov-preneurship": embedding with governments to build policies, institutions, and strategic frameworks. Most leaders are "lonely" and welcome diaspora expertise, contrary to corruption narratives. - On execution over ideology: Management consulting in emerging markets requires output orientation, not retainer relationships. Clients want expert advice immediately, not consultant armies producing fancy acronyms and quadrant analyses. Notable moments: 1. Why Laurendeau switched from mechanical and aerospace engineering (ENSTA France, Georgia Tech) to management consulting after realising security clearance barriers would limit his US career prospects 2. His observation that at Africa-focused investment conferences in Japan, "people were talking about Africa...with no Africans in the room" 3. Reflections on Arifpay achieving profitability and dividend distribution, proving African fintech could build sustainable, high-performing teams rapidly 4. His frank assessment that young Africans show more "thirst" for knowledge and change than their counterparts in developed economies, despite having fewer resources The contrarian take: Laurendeau's most provocative insight challenges the "patient capital" narrative that dominates African investment discourse. Rather than asking investors to adopt longer time horizons, he argues African markets should provide the confidence and data quality that enables rapid decision-making. Image credit: Enkopa Lab

Topics covered in this episode:

• * ty documentation site and uv migration guide*
• * uv build backend is now stable + other Astral news*
• * Refactoring long boolean expressions*
• * fastapi-ml-skeleton*
• Extras
• Joke

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About the show

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• Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social
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Michael #1: ty documentation site and uv migration guide

• via Skyler Kasko
• Astral created a documentation site for ty (PR #744 in release 0.0.1-alpha.13).
• Astral added a page on migrating from pip to a uv project in the uv documentation. (PR #12382 in release 0.7.19).
• Talk Python episode on ty.

Brian #2: uv build backend is now stable + other Astral news

• The uv build backend is now stable

  • Tim Hopper via Python Developer Tooling Handbook

• From Charlie Marsh

  • “The uv build backend is now stable, and considered ready for production use. An alternative to setuptools, hatchling, etc. for pure Python projects, with a focus on good defaults, user-friendly error messages, and performance. When used with uv, it's 10-35x faster.”

  • “(In a future release, we'll make this the default.)”

    [build-system]
    requires = ["uv_build>=0.7.19,<0.8.0"]
    build-backend = "uv_build"
    

  • I believe it’s faster, but I agree with Brett Cannon in asking “What's being benchmarked? I'm not sure what a "backend sync" is referring to other than maybe installing the build back-end?”

• See also: uv: Making Python Local Workflows FAST and BORING in 2025 - Hynek

Brian #3: Refactoring long boolean expressions

• Trey Hunner

• This is applied boolean logic, and even folks who learned this in a CS program probably did so early on, and may have forgotten it.

• How can you improve the readability of long Boolean expressions in Python?

  • Put parens around the whole expression and separate clauses onto different lines

  • Where to put boolean operators between clauses? at the end of the line or the beginning?

    • PEP8 recommends the beginning

      if (expression1
      and expression2
      and expression3):
      ...
      

  • Naming sub-expressions with variables

    • Odd downside that wouldn’t occur to me. All expressions are evaluated, thus not taking advantage of expression short-circuiting.

  • Naming operations with functions

    • Less readable, but takes advantage of short-circuiting

  • Using De Morgan’s Law : replacing a compound expression with a similar (and hopefully easier to read) expression

    # neither: we want both to be false
    not (a or b) == (not a) and (not b)
    
    # never_both: at least one false
    not (a and b) == (not a) or (not b)
    

Michael #4: fastapi-ml-skeleton

• FastAPI Skeleton App to serve machine learning models production-ready.
• This repository contains a skeleton app which can be used to speed-up your next machine learning project.
• The code is fully tested and provides a preconfigured tox to quickly expand this sample code.
• A sample regression model for house price prediction is included in this project.
• Short write up on "What does set -a do?"

Extras

Brian:

• OCF

Michael:

• via Wei Lee

• Extra Airflow ruff rules:

  Starting from Ruff version 0.11.13, most changes from Airflow 2 to Airflow 3 can be automated using AIR3. (It’s still in preview so a “—-preview” flag is needed)

  e.g., if you have the following Airflow 2 code

  import datetime
  
  from airflow.models import DAG
  from airflow.operators.empty import EmptyOperator
  
  with DAG(
    dag_id="my_dag_name",
    start_date=datetime.datetime(2021, 1, 1),
    schedule_interval="@daily",
  ):
  EmptyOperator(task_id="task")
  

  it can be fixed with uvx ruff check --select AIR3 --fix --unsafe-fixes --preview

  import datetime
  
  from airflow.sdk import DAG
  from airflow.providers.standard.operators.empty import EmptyOperator
  
  with DAG(
    dag_id="my_dag_name",
    start_date=datetime.datetime(2021, 1, 1),
    schedule="@daily",
  ):
  EmptyOperator(task_id="task")
  

  which works with Airflow 3.

Joke:

• Front Toward Enemy