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Issue 275: Platform agnostic

Complexity is one of those things that computer science and software engineering has sought to reduce over time. No, don't laugh, I'm serious. While new techs may come in and make our lives messier, soon the industry turns its mind towards simplifications: standards, reusable components, platform-independent solutions, and so on. ---

We've got a lot of conversations for you along those lines. In the latest Leaders of Code podcast, Ben Popper chats with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, and guests from Lloyds Banking Group about how to simplify and standardize a complex engineering org. On the main podcast, we have chats with the CEO of Dataiku about simplifying the data to genAI pipeline, and with Laly Bar-Ilan, Chief Scientist at Bit, about how they are using genAI to create reusable components, not code. ---

And in the questions and links, we're dropping knowledge you didn't even know you needed. Is women and children first a discriminatory policy? Can you host your blog on a Wii? Are millennials also flat earthers? Would you buy a computer from a raccoon?

From the blog

Standardization and simplification as key to engineering excellence

In this episode of Leaders of Code, we chat with guests from Lloyds Banking Group about their focus on engineering excellence and the need for organizations to adapt to new technologies while ensuring customer safety and meeting their expectations.

Community Products roadmap update, April 2025

An update on recent launches and the upcoming roadmap

Visually orchestrating data diagnostics but platform agnostic

Ryan chats with Dataiku CEO and cofounder Florian Douetteau about the complexities of the genAI data stack and how his company is orchestrating it.

Generating components, not tokens

On today’s episode, Ben and Ryan chat with Laly Bar-Ilan, Chief Scientist at Bit.

Interesting questions

Caps Lock keeps turning on in each application separately

OR YOU COULD JUST EMBRACE YELLING ALL THE TIME.

Does offering women and children first priority for limited places on a lifeboat breach discrimination law?

“In this case, saving the lives of children would constitute a legitimate aim as they are generally more vulnerable than adults and weaker swimmers than adults.”

Are a third of American Millennials flat Earthers?

One-third know the Earth isn't perfectly round and is actually an oblate spheroid.

How would a plant disconnected to the ground get nitrogen?

The same way plants connected to the ground do: dissolved in water.

Links from around the web

The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet

The internet is becoming more disorienting by design.

This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii

It's the opposite of an emulator.

How we diagnosed and fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 anomaly from 15 billion miles away

Debugging becomes way harder when you have 45 hours of latency between command and response.

The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great

Raccoons are a lot like early PC users: dark circles around their eyes, eat garbage, and occasionally hide in the attic.


Onboard, organize, and bring your team up to speed in a jiffy. Try Stack Overflow for Teams.