Gaurav Bhattacharya grew up in New Delhi, in a blue collar family. He lost his Dad early in his life. He took influence from his older brother and his love for programming, getting hooked on C/C++. He loves building things, including video games, of which he built his first one at the age of 12. In High School, he pursued a startup idea that led him to skip college, and eventually exit. Outside of tech, he lives in San Francisco and continues his love for gaming. He also enjoys watching live sports - the Dodgers, Lakers and Warriors.
At his prior startup, Gaurav and his team were working in the healthcare space. They became learners of go-to market strategies, how to do sales, and how to do marketing. They enjoyed it so much that they grew to want to start their next company in that space.
In this episode of Leaders of Code, Ben Matthews, Senior Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow, and Loïc Houssier, CTO at Superhuman, dive into how engineering teams can navigate paradigm shifts in a world of constant technological change. They discuss the importance of leadership in an ever-shifting industry and highlight the concept of aligned autonomy as a way to empower teams and increase organizational velocity.
The conversation also covers:
The impact of AI on workflows and practices across the entire organization at Superhuman, including improving onboarding, helping employees streamline their work, and enabling teams to tackle projects that were previously put on hold.
The strategic use of qualitative and quantitative engineering performance metrics to measure and improve team effectiveness.
Ryan Petersen is the CEO of Flexport. Petersen joins Big Technology to discuss how the latest round of tariffs and trade-war maneuvers are rewiring supply chains worldwide. Tune in to hear him unpack everything from 145 % “Liberation Day” duties and $5 K containers to the death of the de minimis loophole and what it means for Amazon, Temu, and Shein. We also cover the Panama Canal drought, AI that robocalls 400 K truckers, warehouse-robot reality checks, and why customs fraud just became the DOJ’s No. 2 white-collar priority. Hit play for a rapid-fire scorecard on what’s changing, who’s winning, and what’s next in global trade.
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In this episode of The BlueHat Podcast, host Nic Fillingham is joined by George Hughey from Microsoft who returns to discuss his Blue Hat India talk on variant hunting, explaining how MSRC uses submission data from hacking competitions like Pwn2Own and Tianfu Cup to uncover additional security vulnerabilities in Windows. George shares how incentives in competitions differ from bug bounty programs, how tools like CodeQL assist variant hunting, and why collaborating with the security research community is key to improving Windows security.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
How hacking competitions help find real-world Windows vulnerabilities
The role of MSRC in hunting variants beyond submitted vulnerabilities
Why fuzzing is not always effective for modern edge cases
Some Questions We Ask:
How do you decide which cases to pursue for variant hunting?
What advice do you have for researchers submitting variants?
How does the CodeQL team collaborate with your team?
Artem Rodichev was born and raised in Kazakhstan, surrounded by the mountains. He loves hiking, and pretty much all outdoor activities. He jokes that he was raised by computers, as he was always playing games, trying to learn hacking, and more. He has always be interested in stories, in particular science fiction. He read a lot of books and watched movies, being fascinated with plots around empathetic AI like Blade Runner and Joy. These movies sparked his motivation to move forward to bringing this world to life.
Artem spent several years building a Core AI stack at Replica. What he noticed was that people really enjoyed connecting with their digital friends - and, he noticed the limitations of this experience. He aimed to correct that limitation, in starting a new venture focused on boarder empathetic AI.
Mathew John, the award-winning Creative Director at the United States National Park Service joins the show to explore the transformative power of storytelling in the public sector. From growing up as a second-generation American in small-town Ohio to producing emotionally charged films for America's most treasured public lands, Mathew shares how his lived experiences and emotional intuition fuel his creative process. The conversation dives into the distinction between making videos and telling meaningful stories, the importance of vulnerability in creative leadership, and the tangible impact of narrative — including a film that helped secure over $16 billion for park infrastructure.
M.G. Siegler is the author of Spyglass. He joins Big Technology podcast for the first installment of our new monthly discussion about Big Tech strategy and AI! Today, we cover why Apple may want to outsource Siri's brain to Anthropic or OpenAI, the rise of voice Ai, why Anthropic could be the right fit, and the complexity of what working with Apple would mean for Anthropic's business. We also touch on Zuck's superintelligence bet, Elon's new third party, the end of the EV credit, and whether AI browsers are worth it. Tune in for the first in our new series!
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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
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“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.)”
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?”
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)
