OTC CatchUp Summaries

General introductions.

Dheeraj Lalwani and Swapnil Borkar shared their experiences of introducing themselves at Google I/O Extended, May 2022 organised by GDG MAD.

Himanshu Sharma shared his experience as an incoming MTS (Member of Technical Staff) at Vymo.

Darshan Rander suggested caching for LeetDroid so that it wouldn’t need to fetch data frequently, leading to quicker load times.

Darshan Rander talked about how Android uses XML to declare layouts and Java to provide logic, similar to a Web Browser, where HTML and CSS provide a layout and JS provides logic for that web app.

We talked about how users quarrel about a particular company being better among sister concerns even though the parent company reaps most of the benefits irrespective of which company seems to be better.

Siddharth Bhatia talked about how Jio and some US based Telecommunication providers censor some news sites.

Saurabh Daware talked about what he has been working on at Razorpay.

Saurabh Suryan talked about how Server Side Rendering could provide better performance in web apps uilt using React.js.

Saurabh Suryan and Jay talked about how React.js has a lot of dependencies.

We discussed the interactivity problem with heavy apps like Netflix or Amazon which take a considerable amount of time to load, and how this can deteriorate user experience.

Harsh Kapadia shared an article Keyboard Shortcuts on Browser: A Hot Mess.

We talked about why many people are getting fatigued with React.js.

Harsh Kapadia asked what Hydration in Web Development meant.

Siddharth Bhatia asked why more people gravitate towards Web and Mobile Application Development as opposed to Desktop Development.

Abhigyan Bafna asked about how to explore various Tech domains.

Darshan Rander shared a video on how Flutter enhances web apps.

We discussed how Google Chrome and Flutter use the Skia rendering engine.

Saurabh Suryan talked about the Graph Protocol, where the code is written in TS, which is compiled to WebAssembly and then deployed on the Blockchain.

Dhiraj Chauhan talked about GitHub Field Day.

We talked about how Flutter started working on it’s own graphical rendering engine called Impeller.

Jay Kaku asked about some ways to maintain or improve his curiosity about everything. He talked about how writing blogs and editing them based on questions in the comments might help him increase his knowledge depth and force him to question things on a basic level with some accountability.

Darshan Rander talked about Joins and user accessing data from a single table in SQL databases, while suggesting how we might not think about many things and reason behind its implementation in a certain way.

We talked about how most people are not decided with what they are doing, and how every one is figuring stuff out at their own pace.

Saurabh Suryan talked about Closures, Hoisting and other JS features.

We talked about how Canonical Links help in better SEO, since copied blogs are ranked lower.

Saurabh Daware talked about what features others could add to his Text to Handwriting project.

Jay Kaku asked about the reason behind not using OTPs in Foreign Exchanges.

We discussed about why DSA might become boring when it is only used while solving Competitive Programming problems.

Darshan Rander showcased updates to Stocker, a Content/Inventory Management System.

Dhiraj Chauhan showcased LeetDroid, an android client for LeetCode.

Harsh Kapadia showcased a small project where he implemented JWT authorization and CORS.

General introductions.

Dheeraj Lalwani asked for suggestions for buying a laptop.

Activision

Ashwin Kumar Uppala talked about a Python program made for CS50 office hours, which would create a mosaic from some moments in the meet.

Jaden Furtado showcased a vulnerability in a web app which was using Elasticsearch.

Aditya Oberai, Darshan Rander and Harsh Kapadia discussed different improvements to Appwrite.

Harsh Kapadia asked Aditya Oberai why companies which take a lot of time to reach the place where their competitors currently are, get funding. Won’t the competitors reach much farther ahead by the time the others catch up? Aditya said that these smaller companies capitalize on issues of their competitors and people provide these smaller companies with funding based on the culture, growth, finances, vision, etc. hoping that the company becomes mainstream and they get returns on their investment.

We compared REST and GraphQL.

Aditya Oberai shared his good and bad experiences organising hackathons.

Pranil Chitre asked for feedback on his project’s Figma UI templates.

Aditya Oberai and Ashwin Kumar Uppala talked about breakthecode.tech.

Sunidhi Shende shared her experience of building a project for Microsoft Engage 2022, which involved checking the attention span of a user using ML.

Dheeraj Lalwani showcased updates to Dekho, an on-demand video streaming web app.

Darshan Rander showcased Stocker, a Content/Inventory Management System.

Kaustubh Khavnekar showcased Toronto MLS Parser, a web scraper to scrape listings of Toronto apartment rental listings generated by the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board hosted on a MLS system.

Jaden Furtado showcased Blossom, a 'To Do' web app with a fun twist that might make one smile.

Rishit Dagli showcased GLU, an easy-to-use library for activation functions.

Siddharth Bhatia showcased a snippet of Glorious Demo, an aesthetically pleasing way to demonstrate a code in action.

Siddharth Bhatia also showcased JKL, a utility script for power users using Vim to remap arrow keys.

General introductions.

We talked about unknowingly incurring AWS charges.

Sreekaran Srinath talked about the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 mask mandate issue.

Ashwin Kumar Uppala told us about him organising CodeDay Hyderabad.

Research papers

We discussed the GitHub Campus Expert training.

Activision video game testing

Aditya Oberai told us about his recent pull request that added an OAuth adapter for Auth0 to Appwrite.

We talked about the Zero-width space bug in WhatsApp that made it crash.

We discussed the social and marketing aspects of TikTok and Instagram Reels.

We talked about syncing issues in apps, i.e., the data and state synchronization problems that occur when offline updates in apps sync with the backend/database when the app comes back online.

We talked about ARP tables.

We discussed how Flipkart double encodes URLs to remove any special characters.

We talked about the pros and cons of .NET.

Dheeraj Lalwani and Chirag Lulla showcased an on-demand video streaming server.

General introductions.

Shubham Sah told us how he unknowingly worked on a project that his company wanted to bench for three weeks and advised us to always enquire whether a bug should be solved or was worth solving. 😂

GitHub Copilot

We discussed how effective Google not allowing people from Russia, Belarus and occupied Ukranian territories to participate in GSoC is, in context of the Russia vs Ukraine war.

Research papers

Siddharth Bhatia told us why a QR code has three squares in its corners.

User Interface (UI) Design

Omkar Khair talked about Enterprise Lobbying and Partner Programs.

Vatsal Patel talked about his experience at AMD helping him at his current job at Activision.

Vatsal Patel told us how interviews work and his interview experience at Tesla.

Jay Kaku explained Task Registers and Paging.

Compiler Design (LLVM)

Darshan Rander and Pranav Dani showcased Short Terms, a Browser (Chrome) Extension to summarize long and tedious Terms and Conditions.

General introductions.

Karuna Tata, Aditya Oberai and Sreekaran Srinath talked about organizing meetups, dealing with large crowds and tips for sponsorships and food.

Sreekaran Srinath talked about MLH Fellowship, competitiveness and about his future visit to KubeCon EU at Valencia.

Aditya Oberai and Sreekaran Srinath talked about the MLH Coaches program, its requirements, who it’s tailored for.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Aditya Oberai and Sreekaran Srinath also spoke about MLH Hackcon, traveling to NYC and delivering talks at Hackcon.

Hriday Keswani, Aditya Oberai, and Siddharth Bhatia spoke about developing Windows applications and why it’s so difficult.

We talked about OS choices, dual booting, Linux, etc.

Harsh Kapadia talked about his experience at the Hack This Fall Mumbai meetup.

Harsh Kapadia talked about his favourite part of meetups, which is networking with people and getting to learn from them.

We talked about the features of various mobile phone models such as OnePlus, iPhone, etc.

Harsh Kapadia asked a doubt about regarding passing variables through functions and bypassing the State variable. (Commit)

We talked about how some people in the Crypto community are not ready to accept the issues that exist. (Example)

Product Management/Product Manager (PM)

We talked about Elon Musk buying a stake of Twitter.

General introductions.

Himanshu Sharma and Sreekaran Srinath talked about their job roles.

Siddharth Dayalwal told us about the Mumbai edition of the Hack This Fall meetup six city tour.

Rishit Dagli talked about the colleges that he was interested in to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Canada and the USA.

We tried to solve Sainath Poojary’s issues with DNS and GitHub Pages while hosting his portfolio. He eventually managed to solve the issue by shifting his hosting from GitHub Pages to Vercel.

Jay Kaku shared a book Modern Compiler Implementation in C.

Rishit Dagli talked about the MLH Fellowship.

Kaustubh Khavnekar talked about his job responsibilities as a Senior Platform Engineer at Quantiphi that involve using various AWS offerings, writing various Infrastructure as Code scripts (Terraform), etc.

Ishan Sharma and Harsh Kapadia talked about certain improvements in HackerDraw and the team behind it.

Ishan Sharma shared how he appreciated that got an e-mail from Fig with steps to solve an error that he was facing while installing it. We weren’t sure whether that was really great DX or whether it was an invasion of privacy.

Kartik Soneji talked about the programming language Rust and why was it built.

Harsh Kapadia showcased updates to Git Graph, a visualizer for the Directed Acyclic Graph that Git creates to connect Commit, Tree and Blob objects internally.

Ramyak Mehra showcased AR Slide Puzzle, an Augmented Reality (AR) slide puzzle game with a twist that he submitted to the Flutter Puzzle Hack.

Harsh Kapadia showcased IPL APP, an Auction Price Predictor (APP) for the Indian Premiere League (IPL).

Jaden Furtado showcased Self Help App, a web app to plan out tasks.

Jaden Furtado also showcased CodeIt, a web based code editor that he built using PHP, Python and other FOSS.

General introductions.

Vatsal talked about his job shift from AMD to Activision. He also shared his interview experience.

We talked about Anime and everyone shared which Anime they were interested in.

We talked about Generics in programming languages

We shared what books we were reading and here are a few books that were talked about:

Darshan Rander asked for tips on conducting offline sessions.

Rishit Dagli gave some of his tips from his own experiences.

Siddharth Bhatia showcased his project Paste-Anywhere.

Kaustubh Khavnekar showcased his new website a blog on how he built it.

Jaden Furtado shared his project - Self Help App.

General introductions.

We spoke about the Smart India Hackathon, and several people showcased their projects. (please see the projects section)

We had a discussion on the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and how it’s a great way for beginners to get started with open source, and work with some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry.

Siddharth Bhatia asked what is Kubernetes and Sreekaran Srinath talked about it.

We briefly touched upon the difference between certificates and certifications, and why professional certifications from reputed organizations can be helpful to one’s career.

Siddharth Bhatia asked about the Internet of Things (IoT) and our opinions on it

Jay Kaku and Kartik Soneji discussed on if the RISC5 instructionset was open source, and x86 was not.

It was Ashwin Kumar Uppala’s birthday, Happy Birthday Ashwin! 🥳

Dheeraj Lalwani showcased his HTTP Live Streaming project workflows:

Jaden Furtado showcased updates to his 'To Do' web app with a robot made with Three.js.

Hardik Raheja, Jaden Furtado and Kartik Soneji spoke about their SIH project that attempts to provide a way for people to conduct digital transactions even when all parties are completely offline.
Hardik asked for product name suggestions.

General introductions.

Kartik Soneji told us how he found a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability on a Canadian government web site as they were using document.write.

Apurv Khare, who runs the YouTube channel What The Code, talked about how he is reading up a lot on web.dev.

We talked about how Open Source packages are being sabotaged by their maintainers.

We discussed the new Apple M1 Ultra processor.

Ashwin Kumar Uppala talked about his journey with communities and he shared his own community Hackerbad.

Harsh Kapadia shared a video on the recent Spotify outage that was a Microservice failure caused by GCP’s Traffic Director service going down.

We discussed self-help books and how similar and known ideas are repeated again and again in different forms in such books.

Different niche Mental Health services such as Raahee, Reflectly, Waking Up, Calm, etc. were discussed.

Kartik Soneji talked about his hilarious SIH internal hackathon experience. He also shared his project idea with everyone.

Aditya Oberai told us about his Imagine Cup hackahton experience.

Jaden Furtado shared The Git Parable.

Mihika Gaonkar showcased her Data Visualization project OTC Analysis, which is a dashboard created using Power BI and Google Data Studio for analyzing previous OTC CatchUps.

Krishna Dave and Piyush Paul showcased MindMate, an Android app for patients suffering from Dementia.

Kartik Soneji, Jay Kaku, Saket Thota and Darshan Rander showcased _DemiBuddy, a web app and Flutter app for Dementia patients.

General introductions.

Shubham Sah told us that they are planning an offline TensorFlow User Group (TFUG) Mumbai meetup soon. Do join their Telegram group for updates.

Shubham Sah explained his work at FedEx which mostly revolves around Data Cleaning and migrating older systems to newer standards.

Shubham Sah and Kartik Soneji talked about the SAP’s Crystal Solutions.

We had a conversation about Log4j, where Shubham Sah told us that it was an issue with Java Naming Directory Interface (JNDI) which was discovered years before, but not patched.

Ramyak Mehra expressed interest in learning Compiler Design, for which Jaden Furtado shared a few resources.

Darshan Rander talked about his recent internship interview experience at UBS.

Prathamesh Shanbhag talked about his work experience at AutoVRse.

Darshan Rander, Harsh Kapadia, Sreekaran Srinath and others discussed whether it is okay to take sponsorships for community meetups and events.

We also had a long discussion on DevRel and its pros and cons.

We talked about interview processes with Anil Harwani and also talked about what Whiteboard Interviews are and why is it necessary to have different styles of interviewing for different positions.

Anil Harwani advised us that to grow, we needed to devoid ourselves from all the luxury hardware and work on bad hardware.

We laughed while reminiscing the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee modification.

Anil Harwani showed us a few research papers and asked us to read them.

Jaden Furtado showcased updates to his 'To Do' web app with a robot made with Three.js.

Nikshita Karkera showcased the project she is building for The GDSC 2022 Solution Challenge.

Prathamesh Shanbhag showcased his links/portfolio site made with Three.js that also has a Tesla Cybertruck model.

General introductions.

Aditya Oberai shared a link to how one can detect a click event inside an iframe.

Sanni Prasad told us how he transitioned from Xamarin to Flutter for building cross-platform mobile apps.

Aditya Oberai informed us that .NET MAUI is the successor of Xamarin.

Aditya Oberai also told us that Anders Hejlsberg is the core developer of TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal.

Aditya Oberai shared Becoming a Better Developer Through Open-Source.

Material Design

Points that should be covered in cover letters for job applications

How to talk about personal experiences relevant to the job without oversharing/crossing the boundaries.

We talked about how people/organisations/companies who sponsor OSS maintainers don’t have the right to dictate that Open Source project’s direction or ask for personal attention from the maintainer. (Context)

Meta and Metaverse

Anil Harwani told us about the working cultures at various companies and also told us how some companies have processes that force hiring idiots.

Anil Harwani talked about abstraction and gave us a few wonderful quotes.

We talked about Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS).

Shrinath Gupta asked how he could make his team follow best practices when not being in a leadership position. People told him that he could try to make his teammates understand, but it would be very difficult, as not everyone is equally passionate and/or caring about things and don’t want to go the extra mile for a fixed salary. Not being in a commanding position makes it even more difficult. He was advised to maintain a code standard for himself and eventually leave the company if the code standards were very bad and things don’t improve at all.

Anil Harwani talked about Tridactyl, a Vim-like interface for Firefox.

Comparing Technologies

Power states and power models in computers.

Omkar Khair and Anil Harwani discussed the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

A standup bit on how Bill Burr destroyed Steve Jobs was shared.

Branch Prediction

Darshan Rander shared his experience interviewing for an internship at UBS.

Jay Kaku showcased the processor design for a Four Stage Pipelined RV32i Core that he built using TL-Verilog while following course material.

Harsh Kapadia showcased updates to Git Graph, a visualizer for the Directed Acyclic Graph that Git creates to connect Commit, Tree and Blob objects internally.

General introductions.

Ishan Sharma explained hiding subdomains from subdomain-finding tools using Nginx by adding wildcard CNAME entries in the DNS console and then configuring Nginx to handle the subdomain requests.

Vatsal Patel told us how he overclocked processors. Vatsal and his teammate cooled about 40 AMD Ryzen processors using Liquid Nitrogen. They also used Cinebench to run tests on all the processors.

Vatsal Patel also told us about Cold Boot Attacks which involve pouring Liquid Nitrogen on RAMs to freeze unencrypted data to access it.

Yash Narang showcased the 2022 HackerRank interns web app. It’s amazing!

Anil Harwani talked about job responsibilities and how his role always spans various projects at AMD.

We saw Ishan Sharma battle it out in a Front-end vs. Back-end Developer Rap Battle.

Harsh Kapadia told everyone how major browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge upgrading to version 100 will break some sites.

We talked about PXE Boot.

Harsh Kapadia showcased updates to Git Graph, a visualizer for the Directed Acyclic Graph that Git creates to connect Commit, Tree and Blob objects internally.

Jaden Furtado showcased an updated version of his Mental Health web app with 3D robot that he built using Three.js and Spline.

Saurabh Suryan showcased a React.js based tutorial component he built at an internship at aftershoot.com that highlights DOM elements and gives a description about them.

Ishan Sharma presented HackerDraw, a tool for collaboratively making informative diagrams using whiteboards, sequence diagrams, database diagrams and mind maps. He made it while interning at HackerRank.

General introductions.

Jaden Furtado shared site reliability engineering books by Google.

Jaden Furtado Hack

We discussed how Darshan Rander and Dheeraj Lalwani's project idea can be licensed out as a SaaS.

Dheeraj Lalwani shared a link to The Million Dollar ^Homepage.

We discussed about NFTs.

[Siddharth] shared his AR project idea in which he aims to convert the tall glass buildings for example Times Square, in New York to NFT Art museums.

Anil Harwani discussed about C/C++ language.

Jaden Furtado shared a project he was working on: A to-do app with a 3d animated robot that is happy when you complete a task.

Sreekaran Srinath discussed how he ended up getting internships and 2 jobs.

Anil Harwani shared with everyone how he got in contact with AMD and his journey in technology.

Aaditya Chinchkhedkar asked for help on a BIOS issue he was facing.

Anil Harwani told everyone about how audio is usually the more difficult engineering issue when working with livestreams.

Aditya Oberai shared his article - What Is DevRel?.

Someone shared a video - We ACTUALLY downloaded more RAM by Linus Tech Tips.

A lot of tips and discussions happened on getting through offline college. Sreekaran Srinath told everyone how he slept through most of his college.

Aditya Oberai and [Saurabh] shared how they’ve been writing their own component libraries and basically replacing all frameworks and libraries by ones they’ve been writing on their own and opensourcing them.

Dheeraj Lalwani asked everyone how Webhooks and how they work internally.

Dheeraj Lalwani asked a few doubts about Server Sent Events, how they work and about how it really works.

Anil Harwani explained the Pub-Sub - Publisher Subscriber architecture.

We compared xCloud and Stadia which are two functional cloud gaming services that offer different types of experiences.

Everyone collectively hated on RGB lit keyboards and other computer accessories.

Anil Harwani shared a video - GeForce Now RTX 3080 Cloud Review vs xCloud/Stadia - The Best Streaming Solution?.

We talked about AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ Processors.

Sreekaran Srinath talked about him moving to the United States.

A lot of things about gaming were discussed.

Anil Harwani and Aditya Oberai had an intriguing conversation about DevRel.

We talked about Warefare games.

Ishan Sharma's rap battle at Hackerrank was showcased.

We talked about ed-tech startups, Coding Blocks Mafia and how it gave rise to a number of strong players in the ed tech startup world.

We talked about the infamous bitcoin pizza.

Aditya Oberai shared his experience at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup.

More discussuins about gaming and various games followed.

We once again took on the topic of DevRels and Sales.

We talked about Developer Experience (DX).

Dheeraj Lalwani and Darshan Rander showcased their presented their project idea - SocialHub which is a social media engagement aggregator for influencers/companies.

General introductions.

Himanshu Sharma shared his article on Securing Local Storage in Flutter.

Vedant Panchal asked how one should share sensitive information like API keys with project members.

Talking about PGP started talks about

Anil Harwani suggested reading The Clouflare Blog.

We talked about the history of Serial and COM ports in computers.

Anil Harwani and Omkar Khair once again implored everyone to explore the internals of various technologies and to not just play 'lego' with technology (just blindly combining various libraries to make something work).

Omkar Khair showcased ATOM Matrix, a compact development board with a 5 * 5 RGB LED matrix.

Omkar Khair gave us an example to justify why Security Through Obscurity (STO) is a bad idea.

Omkar Khair told us that while working in a team it is important to identify the inclinations of people (Engineering, Marketing, Management, etc) as it helps in identifying the intentions behind something that they are suggesting. Whether to consider all, some or none of those suggestions is up to one’s discretion, but that’s difficult to do without knowing where they are coming from.

Omkar Khair told us that it is important to listen to discussions against something that one is passionate passionate about, as it helps in refining one’s perspective.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies

There was a debate on whether all Open Source contributions are equal (not 'big' or 'small') and/or are equal in value.

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education course was shared.

Sunidhi Shende talked about her Augmented Reality project idea and Vatsal Patel and Harsh Kapadia advised her to break down her idea to eventually tackle the entire project idea. Targeting smaller targets can help in extrapolating to other use cases as well.

Kedar Karbele and Darshan Rander enquired about the requirement of Docker.

Sreekaran Srinath talked about his job offers.

Omkar Khair showcased Weebo, a two-wheel bot controlled over WiFi with a live camera stream.

Jaden Furtado showcased a Mental Health web app with 3D robot that he built using Three.js and Spline.

Ishan Sharma showcased a new version of his portfolio which uses WebGL animations.

Sahil Prasad showcased a C program which simulated a bare-bones calculator using an if-else ladder.

General introductions.

During the project showcase section Anil Harwani rightly mentioned that we should play Lego with software, but we should also understand how the pieces are shaped and what they are made of. Getting into the 'What', 'Why' and 'When' of these libraries and tools is important to grow as an Engineer and build better and more efficient software.

Bloated software

Harsh Kapadia talked about ULTRARAM as an addition to last CatchUp’s talk on DRAMs and SRAMs.

Anil Harwani told us how certain research papers try really hard to come up with catchy names and marketing tactics. He also asked us to question whether those things will be required by the time they have been tested for scale and become mainstream.

We talked about being a Generalist versus a Specialist and Anil Harwani told us that once someone has been in the industry for decades they become a T-shaped person due to their exposure to different things.

Anil Harwani shared an article Exploring SIMD performance improvements in WebAssembly.

We talked about the I²C and I3C protocols.

Vatsal Patel told us how he was using TinyPilot to KVM into machines to remotely run benchmarks and debug systems.

Vatsal Patel helped us compare AMD and Intel processors once again. We talked about AMD client processors such as Ryzen and Threadripper and AMD server boards such as EPYC.

Vatsal Patel also helped us compare AMD, Nvidia and Intel’s graphics cards.

Vatsal Patel made us understand why chips manufactured by TSMC and Samsung are different. Some of the reasons were that the manufacturing processes are different, raw material quality differs, the technology used by the two differs, etc.

Vatsal Patel told us how aware the Marketing department of a company has to be.

Ishan Sharma and Vatsal Patel told us stories of how Microsoft and Apple respectively were very generous in providing replacements when their products got damaged.

Harsh Kapadia told everyone that npm is not an acronym for 'Node Package Manager' and that it should not be written in upper case, as mentioned in npm’s FAQ on branding.

Ishan Sharma at HackerRank

Ishan Sharma told us about a mistake he recently made in production when he got locked out of a Database because he forgot its password. He also walked through the data recovery process.

Ishan Sharma also shared design.ishandeveloper.com where he posts case studies on his product designs.

We compared Apple and Android ecosystems and discussed vendor lock-ins and which ecosystem is more distracting.

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education course was talked about.

Harsh Kapadia explained Cron jobs and Cron syntax.

Vatsal Patel shared 14 Patterns to Ace Any Coding Interview Question.

There was a discussion on whether coding should compulsorily be taught to children and if so, when should it be taught. Vatsal Patel was advocating easing people into it by getting them excited about it.

Kartik Soneji shared his project idea of computers detecting key presses on a table top.

Darshan Rander shared his project idea of summarizing a meet.

The BCM App for Android was talked about.

The revenue model of archive.org was discussed along with the legality of scraping.

Mihika Gaonkar showcased her Data Visualization project OTC Analysis, which is a dashboard created using Power BI for analyzing previous OTC CatchUps.

Chinmay Palav showcased Quiz for Ease, a React.js application for playing quizzes.

Pranil Chitre showcased his productivity app Conquer, which helps one plan tasks and goals by segregating them in daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and long term sections.

Ayush Bhosle showcased SumItUp, an Extractive Summarization project.

Rishit Dagli talked about an update of his project TNT, an implementation of Transformers in Transformers for Image Classification.

Jay Bhavsar showcased CodeVengers Portfolio Page.

Harsh Kapadia talked about Git Internals, a PWA he created using Asciidoctor Jet to collect his Git internals knowledge.

General introductions.

Random Access Memory (RAM)

Cache coherency and the MESI Protocol

We discussed how ML code is executed on computers.

Anil Harwani asked everyone to look up Streaming Stores in hardware and Non-Temporal Mmemory.

TCP and UDP

y-cruncher - A Multi-Threaded Pi-Program.

We also talked about OpenSSL’s Heartbleed bug.

Anil Harwani's message: 'Dig deeper into everything.'

Mayur Kukreja shared an article on How Google stores massive amounts of data — BigTable

Saurabh Suryan and Harsh Kapadia talked about commit message formats.

We discussed about bundling, obfuscation and minification.

Harsh Kapadia asked whether it was okay to re-render a component an extra time or whether one should club the states. It was pertaining to his Git Graph project.

Web3

We talked about burnouts, FOMO and mental health.

We discussed about TypeScript to JavaScript transpilation and the benefits of using TypeScript.

Anil Harwani shared an article Are we really Engineers?

A recurring theme on OTC CatchUp is the fact that a lot of us younger Engineers today only know high level abstracted things and how to use tools. We have less knowledge about the internals of tools and fundamental Computer Science knowledge. This makes us handicapped when things go wrong below the abstraction that we all deal with and in general lead to less-optimized decisions.

Anil Harwani explained why we can’t have all general purpose registers if they are so speed efficient.

We compared AMD and Intel processors.

We discussed the MLH Fellowship.

We talked about the measurement of sizes of Transistors on processors and how more Transistors implies more processing power.

Shivay Lamba shared his talk Machine Learning in Node.js using Tensorflow.js and talked about his upcoming talk at Node Congress.

Saurabh Suryan shared his project Automating my attendance with Python. He used Flask on the server and Beautiful Soup for scraping.

General introductions.

Competitive Programming (CP) and Development: What should be done depends on what one wants to do. If placements is the goal, CP should be stressed upon and one should have some projects. If higher studies is the goal, then Development and research/developing proficiency in the domain of interest is more important.

We talked about the bad UX of the Microsoft Teams desktop app.

Rishit Dagli shared his newsletter which is going to be about Tech and Artificial Intelligence. People can approach him to feature their projects as well!

Chirag Nayyar and Anil Harwani told everyone, how important and expensive data bandwidth is and how important it is to measure it.

Chirag Nayyar also shared how useful the Oracle Cloud Free Tier is and suggested using it to learn and explore the technology.

Omkar Khair explained the recent 'race condition enabling symlink following' vulnerability in Rust, which can be used to trick a privileged program into deleting files and directories the attacker couldn’t otherwise access or delete.

We also talked about Anaconda, a system installer for Linux distributions.

We talked about NVM (Node Version Manager), which manages multiple active Node.js versions on a computer.

Anil Harwani suggested installing Slackware Linux if one wants to configure a lot of options and build all programs (Eg: Python) from their binaries to learn more.

We talked about Cloudflare and Edge Computing.

Anil Harwani shared Serve the Home with everyone to keep up with server hardware and even Cloud VM performance.

Rishit Dagli shared his talk Superpower Your Android Apps with ML: Android 11.

Mihika Gaonkar asked Dheeraj Lalwani about sending data to the backend from the frontend without refreshing the page in a Django project. Dheeraj suggested using the Fetch API.

Anil Harwani asked if anyone was aware of benchmarking (performance and hardware profiling).

Anil Harwani shared an article Growing compute by scaling up and scaling out by IBM.

Anil Harwani shared a few talks on hardware

Anil Harwani explained why Indian data centers don’t have good GPUs.

Sreekaran Srinath shared his experience while being a Teaching Assistant at Harvard CS50.

Rishit Dagli discussed an issue he was facing while adding a SSL Certificate to his newsletter.

Darshan Rander showcased a website he had made using GSAP for his parent’s wedding anniversary.

Dheeraj Lalwani showcased Back to Work, a web-extension trying to fix a problem in the productivity domain.

Tushar Nankani showcased Aankh, a web app for effortless automatic proctoring of online tests.

Harsh Kapadia showcased Git Graph, a visualizer for the Directed Acyclic Graph that Git creates to connect Commit, Tree and Blob objects internally.

General introductions.

Himanshu Sharma shared his blogging profiles

Harsh Kapadia told everyone about his upcoming talk on Git Internals at Sudhanshu Yadav's meetup group The Internals.

We talked about PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) and iPXE which is an open-source implementation of PXE.

Vatsal Patel talked about the kind of projects he was working on at AMD as a Field Application Engineer (FAE).

Himanshu Sharma shared a link to a guide on how to enable and disable Google Drive’s auto backup on Android.

A link to the tool Bundlephobia was shared, which lets one understand the performance cost (bundle size, package composition/dependencies and exports analysis) of `npm install`ing a new NPM package.

Himanshu Sharma talked about securing mobile users' sensitive information (like passwords) by encrypting them on device, which allows for offline access as well. He is currently writing an article on it.

Krishna Gadia talked about securing passwords for a client using the AWS Key Management Service, where the client received a password protected Excel sheet via e-mail and the password on WhatsApp.

Krishna Gadia shared a link to Bandit wargame.

Krishna Gadia also shared a link to FURPS.

Shivay Lamba shared his experience at the HackMIT 2019 hackathon.

Krishna Gadia asked about Little Endian and Big Endian and Jai Dewani shared an answer.

Jay Kaku told everyone about the Nand to Tetris Course, shared his experience of the course and also gave us a walkthrough of the course.

Anil Harwani shared an article How a Single Line of Code Made a 24-core Server Slower Than a Laptop.

Anil Harwani asked us to explore the MESI Protocol.

We also talked about Code morphing.

We talked about x86 & ARM instructions.

Anil Harwani asked us to look up Self Modifying Code and Turing completeness.

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)

Anil Harwani also talked about the CPPC, which describes a mechanism for the OS to manage the performance of a logical processor. It exposes a set of registers to describe abstract performance scale, to request performance levels and to measure per-CPU delivered performance.

Omkar Khair shared a website about Quine Programs.

Jay Kaku asked about the approach of taking a security-first approach while building Microprocessors, to which Anil Harwani replied, "The cost of securing something should not be more than the cost of what you’re securing."

Jay Kaku shared a video on How the Apple AirTags were hacked.

Anil Harwani told us about the CPU-Z freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of our systems.

Anil Harwani also told us about the current CTO of Microsoft Azure Mark Russinovich, who even after 26 years still maintains and updates Sysinternals, a set of utilities he created to help manage, troubleshoot and diagnose Windows systems and applications.

Anil Harwani shared with everyone AutoIt, a scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. He added that they used to use it for game & Excel sheet automation.

Anil Harwani shared a video on AMD Ryzen 7 1700 vs Intel i7-7700K in Excel.

Anil Harwani and Omkar Khair discussed how everyone used to use Pidgin and other IRCs where they could form groups of people using different technologies to interact with each other.

Anil Harwani also shared Tridactyl which is a Vim-like interface for Firefox, which allows one to completely operate Firefox with the keyboard.

Anil Harwani shared how streaming services like Netflix check devices they’re being played on and offer videos quality based on that. It also helps in protecting their higher quality video formats.

Anil Harwani shared a video What It Takes to Break a RAM with ESD.

Anil Harwani told everyone how Inline Encryption and Decryption prevents other people from accessing previously stored data on the same storage drive.

Anil Harwani shared a talk on AMD x86 Memory Encryption Technologies.

Anil Harwani told us about Multi-Layer SSDs (SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC and PLC).

We talked about Storage Tapes and Anil Harwani shared a video on the IBM System Storage Tape Library.

Omkar Khair suggested

Shrinath Gupta asked for suggestions on which service to use if he had to store images and possibly videos in the near future.

Harsh Kapadia shared a talk on Concept Visualise - JavaScript Internals

Anil Harwani told about the various Overclocking events he had been to.

Container management

We talked about Monorepos.

Ritvi Mishra shared an invite to the Arm Software Developers Discord server where they have hardware focused discussions and weekly meetups.

Vedant Panchal showcased his Personal Intro Post Designer project.

Anil Harwani showcased a SSD with ~2 TB storage and showed us the storage chips, cache storage chips, capacitors and the controller on the board.

Anil Harwani showcased the first version of AMD Epyc boards, which are processor boards for data centers.

Omkar Khair talked about Dopemin, his e-mail proxy project.

General introductions.

We discussed how easy Razorpay has made integrating their payment gateway into a website and Jaden Furtado told everyone how he found a vulnerability in a website because of some misconfiguration while integrating the Razorpay payment gateway, which allowed him to intercept requests from the client and buy the product for any price he chose.

Scaling resources

We also talked about Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

Anil Harwani talked about two kinds of design phases DFT (Design for Test) & DFD (Design for Debug) while designing Microprocessors.

Anil Harwani suggested everyone to dig deeper into the infrastructure and to not just think about hardware from a Software Developer’s perspective while building projects.

Anil Harwani shared an article Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years and said that he was a firm believer of it.

Anil Harwani also shared a meme on How to Teach Yourself Programming.

Thinking before building

We talked about how different people perceive Social Media differently and extract different value from it.

Amul Badjatya shared his twitter thread on Twitter growth.

Hardik Raheja shared an article, What is a System Management Unit?

Jay Kaku asked how to apply learnt knowledge, especially in hardware.

Processors

We talked about Unified memory and how are SSDs fast.

Sreekaran Srinath told us how inefficient Jira has been for him and that he automated it.

Sreekaran Srinath talked about how Airtel was blocking certain domains using GitHub Pages without a court order. Someone wrote an open letter to Cloudflare on the issue as well, because Airtel is their vendor.

We discussed about the Faker.js fiasco. It’s a murky situation and no one knows what to say. A video on The Dark Side of Open Source // What really happened to Faker.js? gives some details on the situation.

Unreal Engine

Sreekaran Srinath reiterated Amit Choudhary’s 'Fastest String Search Algorithm' debacle.

Dheeraj Lalwani, Kartik Soneji and Sreekaran Srinath had an extensive discussion on healthy eating habits, weight loss and nutritional content of various everyday foods.

Kartik Soneji reverse engineered Twitter Spaces and helped Sreekaran Srinath download the whole voice recording of a particular space with the help of the browser DevTools and FFmpeg.

Rishit Dagli shared his project which is an implementation of Conformer, a Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition and a Transformer Variant in TensorFlow and Keras.

Ritvi Mishra shared her experiences working at a commission studio for Engineering projects where she helped in building a smart Hookah and talked about using STM32 MCUs and STM32CubeIDE in the process.

Saurabh Suryan shared his Twitter Wrapped project, which was a work in progress.

General introductions.

Service workers and PWAs

Anil Harwani suggested setting up a VM and using Netscape on it to compare the development of the browser and the developer and user productivity with current browsers.

We talked about Smart TVs.

Harsh Kapadia shared a video on why we can’t have nice things.

Anil Harwani shared

We compared the value of Product Experience and Developer Experience.

Kartik Soneji severely critiqued Harsh Kapadia's code and gave tips to improve the code by showing the code that he had refactored.

Rishit Dagli asked Nishanth Sanjeev about Yann LeCun.

There was a lengthy discussion on whether a Masters degree should be pursued in India or abroad.

There was another lengthy discussion comparing the Computer Science and Computer Engineering fields.

Another lengthy discussion was on determining whether the determinant of the empty matrix is 0 or 1.

Ritvi Mishra shared her experiences working at a commission studio for Engineering projects where they built a smart Hookah.

Krishna Gadia and Hardik Raheja talked about

Sreekaran Srinath recapped Amit Choudhary’s 'Fastest String Search Algorithm' debacle.

Harsh Kapadia showcased his project Asciidoctor Jet, which is a ready-to-use jet black themed template for building static sites using Asciidoctor.

Dheeraj Lalwani showcased a Web Extension that he is currently working on called Back to Work, which blocks certain sites to reduce distractions.

Viranchee Lotia showcased his project which involved showcasing wallpapers on an old Android phone using remote ADB and scrcpy.

Amandeep Singh Reen showcased an Android game that he had built using the Unity Game Engine.

General introductions.

Himanshu Sharma explained his article/blog writing process and shared his blog StateNotifier: Improving state change notifiers in Flutter.

Anil Harwani told us how to work with people and how to address various problems that come up while working with them.

Anil Harwani told everyone about James Webb and the engineering marvels of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Anil Harwani shared

We discussed how education has become a business.

Rishit Dagli asked about the benefits of working at a startup and Shivay Lamba, Anam Saatvik Reddy and Sreekaran Srinath pitched in their views.

Anil Harwani shared a book Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering which with a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, offers insights for anyone managing complex projects.

Databases

An article by Jake Archibald on How to win at CORS covering almost everything related to CORS was shared.

We discussed about the value of using IPFS instead of Torrent. Here’s some further reading.

Netflix

We discussed various string manipulation techniques in Shell scripts such as IFS, Shell string manipulation, awk (file) and sed (file).

Threadripper Pro Goes Gaming With Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Cloud Gaming Plan $ Attention Required $

We discussed about serving a website from home.

We talked about Universal Plug and Play (UPNP).

Anil Harwani suggested to not SSH into a server directly over the public internet but to use a VPN.

We discussed about financial planning.

We also discussed about Proprietorship vs LLC.

We talked about what Blockchain is why it is needed.

Harsh Kapadia showcased his project Asciidoctor Jet, which is a ready-to-use jet black themed template for building static sites using Asciidoctor.

Rishit Dagli shared a paper that he had published.

General introductions.

Log4j 2 vulnerability

Dheeraj Lalwani told everyone about his recent internship interview.

Harsh Kapadia shared the news that he was finally a GitHub Campus Expert and praised the program’s extensive training phase.

Rishit Dagli, Viranchee Lotia and Harsh Kapadia discussed about foreign admissions.

Bloom Filters

Clickjacking

Jaden Furtado asked everyone if they had worked with Windows 32 APIs and had a discussion about it with Sanni Prasad.

Sanni Prasad shared his ideas on the Motion and Object Detection and discussed their working and potential project ideas to implement them.

Sanni Prasad shared a project idea which aims at enhancing Indian Government Online forms and standardizing them with the world.

Anil Harwani discussed Spectre and Meltdown, which are known hardware vulnerabilities in modern processors.

Anil Harwani also explained what Speculative Execution is.

We discussed the String Comparison Attack.

Anil Harwani suggested hosting a website from homes using one’s own IP address and opening up ports to receive requests.

We talked about LAMP, WAMP and XAMPP servers and the reason behind X in the name XAMPP.

Anil Harwani suggested avoiding dependencies as far as possible while writing code. He also shared the hilarious motherfuckingwebsite.com.

Krishna Gadia, Omkar Khair and Anil Harwani discussed a task which Krishna was working on at his workplace and talked about BinLog, database snapshots and their usage.

We discussed the architecture and purpose of OLAP and OLTP databases.

We talked about The Missing Semester of Your CS Education.

Anil Harwani told everyone that one part of his daily job includes writing scaffolding software for debugging (which is later discarded) and how he is wired for Bash Programming.

We talked about Stream Table Duality in Apache Kafka.

Darshan Rander and Sanni Prasad discussed how banking applications usually prefer native technologies over cross-platform technologies due to native security features and how those native security features could be used by cross-platform technologies over a native bridge.

Anil Harwani shared a talk on Breaking the x86 Instruction Set.

Dheeraj Lalwani asked Anil Harwani how he ended up in the Hardware domain.

Dheeraj Lalwani spoke to Anil Harwani about Robotics and discussed what went into making Roomba, a simple vacuum cleaning robot.

General introductions.

We recommended a SSD and HDD hybrid laptop to Aaditya Chinchkhedkar. A NVMe SSD was also recommended for a faster performance.

Sreekaran Srinath and Ishan Sharma talked about résumés. They discussed how some seemingly free services don’t allow downloading résumés once the user has made it on their platform, without paying and showcased that résumés in HTML are ATS parsable when converted to PDFs.

Sanni Prasad talked about how heap.io collects ALL user interactions in an app and how one can segregate all the collected data to create charts and visualisations on heap.io’s dashboard. This is easier than planning for analytics tracking while designing the app.

The React Conf 2021 YouTube channel was shared for anyone who wanted to watch the videos.

We discussed the pros and cons of various job offers that Sanni Prasad had received and also talked about ESOP.

Sreekaran Srinath and Ishan Sharma explained what Y Combinator is and the various stages of Startup funding.

Anil Harwani told us how Engineers should know business functions to be able to understand the reasons behind decisions taken by the management and to be able to interact and hold conversations with Business Executives.

Anil Harwani showcased an Azure HBv3 machine with 120 cores.

Anil Harwani explained the reasoning behind PS5 chip shortages. He told us how demand is currently more than supply and talked about substrate, wafer and supply chain problems.

Harsh Kapadia asked how dynamic/automatic OG image generation can be implemented.

Chirag Nayyar told us about his ongoing experience being in a job notice period.

Anil Harwani talked about his work in AMD’s upcoming chip Genoa.

Anil Harwani shared a link to an excellent MIT course, The Missing Semester of Your CS Education.

Anil Harwani told us how he has seen a LOT of companies scale much more than required because they didn’t know the hardware they were using properly and were thus not using it optimally. He said that the more one knows about hardware, the more optimized their service will be.

Anil Harwani also showed us pictures of his amazing custom water-cooled PC.

We talked about the differences between WSL 1 and WSL 2.

Anil Harwani talked on a lot of topics.

Sreekaran Srinath shared The Egg by Andy Weir: A Profound Story on the Process of Becoming.

Kartik Soneji talked about NTLM in Windows. (More on Windows Hashes)

Sreekaran Srinath and Kartik Soneji discussed Dasha’s upcoming hackathon.

Sreekaran Srinath and Kartik Soneji also discussed about people getting overwhelmed when they start exploring new stuff.

Ishan Sharma showcased improved designs for GitHub Wrapped 2021.

Sreekaran Srinath opened a PR on OTC’s website repo to improve the URLs. (Link to PR)

Sreekaran Srinath opened a PR on OTC’s website repo to add himself to the team page as a meme. (Link to PR) (Click on the title of the page to view him!)

General introductions.

We talked about the newly released JavaScript framework called Remix.

Harsh Kapadia told us how good Deta is for hosting. Although it is new and has some limitations, it is super fast (no cold start issues like in Heroku's free tier) and changes to code reflect immediately. Their team is prompt and super helpful as well.

We talked about Compose Multiplatform by JetBrains.

Harsh Kapadia also told us that the concepts used in the Web3 ecosystem are really interesting to discuss.

Ishan Sharma shared how he locked himself out of a server because he forgot to open port 22 (SSH) while setting it up. He had to use the web interface that the Cloud service provided to access the server.

Razorpay’s Design System push was talked about. (Organising Design Systems)

Harsh Kapadia talked about URL Text Fragments, which are very helpful in highlighting certain text on a web page and scrolling to it.

Sreekaran Srinath talked about Advent of Code.

There was a discussion on Networking, followers, real friends and acquaintances.

Sreekaran Srinath told us about the Streamlabs fiascos

We had a discussion on how much technical knowledge a Developer Advocate versus a DevRel (Developer Relations) needs.

Anil Harwani told us to communicate well, be honest about one’s work and to ask a lot of questions. He said that one should always complete the work they have taken up, be on time and communicate well in advance if they will not be able to deliver by the specified time, because it becomes difficult to trust and vouch for someone who does not keep their word.

Anil Harwani also told us about various amazing things he has done at AMD and how his team supercooled a processor using Liquid Nitrogen to be able to overclock it to great extents. (Bottom image on page 6.)

Harsh Kapadia showcased updates to the OTC CatchUp web app.

Harsh Kapadia also showcased the automation that he did for OTC CatchUp reminder and joining Tweets and Telegram messages using GitHub Actions. (Scripts)

Ishan Sharma showcased designs for GitHub Wrapped 2021 and asked for feedback.

General introductions.

We had a long discussion on NFTs and their usecase in the Art world. Most people were of the opinion that they are more for bragging rights than anything else.

Krishna Gadia and Omkar Khair explained a few things about LEDs.

Sreekaran Srinath had issues hosting his blog that Harsh Kapadia solved. It was due to a GitHub Pages misconfiguration. Sreekaran eventually moved on to Netlify after Vercel and GitHub Pages did not work out smoothly for him.

Ishan Sharma demonstrated Snap Camera by Snapchat.

Harsh Kapadia asked for opinions on some changes made to his portfolio by Tushar Nankani.

Kirchoff’s Current and Voltage Laws were talked about, various rules (Fleming’s Right and Left Hand Rules, Maxwell’s Right Hand Thumb Rule, etc) were discussed and P-N Junctions were also talked about.

We went off on a tangent and talked about City Planning for quite some time. Surprisingly, it was an interesting conversation!

Omkar Khair and Krishna Gadia reminisced about old technology that they used to use.

Sreekaran Srinath asked for advice on his future plans, job, work hours and slight Imposter Syndrome feeling.

Omkar Khair and Krishna Gadia gave us a lot of extremely helpful philosophical advice. Some of the resources shared in the course of that chat:

Krishna Gadia showcased his hardware project using which he had made two games (Car Racer and Frog). He had used a Raspberry Pi with a Sense HAT mounted on it.

General introductions.

Harsh Kapadia asked for blog template suggestions.

Sreekaran Srinath suggested moving away from Disqus for handling comments under a blog and using Commento. Harsh Kapadia suggested using GitHub Issues as a blog’s comment section.

Sreekaran Srinath asked why Harsh Kapadia was not using Hashnode’s blog service for his blog and Harsh and Omkar Khair talked about owning one’s content and being able to experiment with it. Omkar also shared a good article on this.

Omkar Khair shared a blog that is run on a computer that is powered by solar energy. (The blog)

Harsh Kapadia talked about how Cloudflare launched a full stack service using which users can build and deploy full stack web apps using Cloudflare Pages. (Cloudflare’s blog on going full stack.)

Omkar Khair explained how DNS Amplification DDoS attacks don’t affect Cloudflare as much. (Cloudflare’s blog on it.)

There was a discussion about Apple starting Self Service Repair. (More on it.)

Omkar Khair explained how huge organisations take a lot of time to implement ideas and the numerous steps involved in getting something in production.

A paper on Bypassing XSS Detection Mechanisms was shared.

Krishna Gadia talked about his work at Gupshup involving the implementation of Change Data Capture (CDC) and cross-joining of data from different sources in an Apache Kafka topic.

We also talked about PCB design, Blinky circuit and EDA tools.

Jay Kaku asked which FPGA should a beginner buy and Omkar Khair suggested buying the cheapest one, as there are high chances of it getting burnt while experimenting with it.

There was a discussion about Stadia aiming to achieve 'Negative Latency' and that lead to talking about Branch Prediction.

Harsh Kapadia shared Sudhanshu Yadav's The Internals YouTube channel where he goes into the internals of various Web technologies. He is hosting another 'The Internals' meetup on December 11. Do attend!

An amazing thread on Cookies by Sudhanshu Yadav was shared.

Harsh Kapadia showcased his portfolio. (Web site | GitHub)

Tanay Kamath showcased KBlock, a call blocker Android app he built in Kotlin. (GitHub)