Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S10 Bonus: Andrew Lau, Jellyfish

Andrew Lau is located in Boston now, but is a California native. He grew up in Oakland, and calls himself the odd duck who went west instead of east, like most people. He went to the north east for school, and stayed to be apart of the startup world, interestingly enough with his current co-founders. Outside of tech, he's married to an AP Calculus teacher, and has two daughters. He enjoys cooking and making new cuisine with his kids. Fun fact, he is a certified barbecue judge in Kansas City, and has come to Texas a time or two to tour the Texas Monthly list.

Andrew met his current co-founders in 1999. Recently, they re-connected, recalling the successes and camaraderie they had during their startup days. They recalled that the act of leading engineering teams is hard - and they wanted to build something that makes that easier.

This is the creation story of Jellyfish.

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Big Technology Podcast - How Amazon Rebuilt Alexa From The Ground Up — With Panos Panay and Daniel Rausch

Panos Panay is the senior vice president of Devices & Services at Amazon. Daniel Rausch is the Vice President of Alexa at Amazon. The two join Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the company rearchitected Alexa, blending a deterministic system with the latest generative AI technology to create something that can both turn your lights off and speak with you about philosophy. We also discuss how all big tech companies seem to be converging on the same contextually aware, general AI assistant, and why Amazon believes Alexa has a chance to win. Tune in for a front row perspective on one of the tech industry's biggest AI projects.

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The Government Huddle with Brian Chidester - 171: The One with the Former Deputy CIO of the Commonwealth of Virginia

Dan Wolf, former Deputy CIO of the Commonwealth of Virginia and Director of State Programs at the Alliance for Digital Innovation joins the show to unpack the evolving landscape of government modernization at the state and local levels. We also discuss the barriers to cloud adoption, how procurement reform can accelerate modernization, and the impact of accessibility mandates on state digital services and why compliance is driving cloud migration.

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S10 E22: Ayush Agarwal, Dodo Payments

Ayush Agarwal is a techy trying to code his way out of things. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science, but more importantly, he discovered entrepreneurship in college, inspired by his successful classmates. He spent years gathering experience in different startup verticals, including fintech. But outside of tech, he loves to play badminton, cricket, and hangout with friends. He is also big into Chess, which he mentioned enjoying Chess.com, as well as our recent interview with their CTO, Josh Levine.

When Ayush met his now co-founder, they started to think through businesses and how much goes into setting up payments, taxes, etc. They started to dream about building this layer of payments, to enable builders to send and receive global payments easily, so they can focus on their core competencies.

This is the creation story of Dodo Payments.

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The Stack Overflow Podcast - Secure coding beyond just memory safety

Semgrep is an AppSec platform that lets devs deploy static application security testing (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA), and secret scans. Explore their docs.

Tanya is the author of Alice and Bob Learn Secure Coding and Alice and Bob Learn Application Security.

She’s also written for our blog:Three layers to secure a software development organization and Continuous delivery, meet continuous security.

Secure coding might be an issue of national security

Follow Tanya on LinkedIn or check out her website.

Stack Overflow user Reishin earned a Populist badge with their answer to piping from stdin to a python code in a bash script.

Big Technology Podcast - OpenAI’s New Model, Jensen’s Bold Claim, Alexa+ Is Here

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI's release of GPT 4.5 2) Is GPT 4.5 a major advance or what? 3) What better EQ gets you in an AI model 4) What reasoning advances can be built on top of GPT 4.5 5) Is AI product or model more important? (cont.) 6) Gary Marcus says OpenAI is in trouble 7) Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 3.7 8) NVIDIA earnings 9) Jensen says reasoning costs 100x typical LLMs 10) Meta wants to build a standalone AI app 11) Will Alexa+ work? 12) RIP Skype

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Big Technology Podcast - OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen: GPT 4.5 is Live and Scaling Isn’t Dead

Mark Chen is the chief research officer at OpenAI. Chen joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the debut of GPT 4.5, the company's largest model, which is going live today. In this bonus episode, Chen speaks about what the new model says about the AI scaling wall, how scaling traditional GPT models compares to reasoning models like OpenAI's o1, how important EQ is for AI models today, whether product matters more than models, and how OpenAI's talent bench looks after last year's departures. Tune in for an inside look at what it took to build OpenAI's newest and biggest large language model, and why OpenAI is committed to pushing the frontier forward.