OTC CatchUp Summaries

Harsh Kapadia shared

Linux and CPU bugs discussion

Bhavesh Kukreja asked about contributing to an issue on OTC CatchUp’s GitHub repository and Harsh Kapadia welcomed it and explained the issue to him.

Kartik Soneji shared Synthoptic Writing.

Alpesh shared Widecanvas AI.

Jaden Furtado talked about Static Code Analysis and we discussed Linters.

Krishna Gadia and Kartik Soneji had a friendly challenge between them about whether running an executable Shell script with a #!/bin/bash shebang as bash script.sh or ./script.sh invokes them in different ways.

Krishna also shared a meme on NoSQL.

Siddharth Bhatia also shared a gesture-recognition to mouse-movement project that he really liked.

Aniket Kadam shared his work on scaling solutions to assist neurodivergent individuals.

Rushil Shrivastava asked Aniket Kadam for advice on whether he should take up a role as a content moderator.

Harsh Kapadia shared

Rishit Dagli inquired Harsh Kapadia about purchasing a couple of GPUs for his research work.

We had a discussion on the differences between the West and East coast in the USA.

Anas Khan shared that he will be joining HackerRank as a software engineer. He also shared his interview experience.

We discussed the hiring processes of tech companies.

Harsh Kapadia shared

Mohit Gangwani shared this new Linux feature makes hacking IMPOSSIBLE

Social media addiction

AI

Tushar Shelke shared that he was building a browser by following the Web Browser Engineering course.

We talked about VLSI (Very-Large Scale Integration) technology and touched upon its front-end and back-end processes.

Harsh Kapadia talked about the 3D V-Cache being below the core (compute) die in the new AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D desktop processors.

Harsh Kapadia shared Qualcomm’s v8 License, Cancelled by Arm!

Alpesh Bhagwatkar shared

Gajraj Singh asked for laptop recommendations. We looked at a few gaming laptops from Lenovo and Dell.

Pranav Dani shared VIM Adventures, an online game based on Vim's keyboard shortcuts (commands, motions and operators).

General Introductions

We had a discussion on the SpaceX launch, about how the Starship was caught with chopsticks.

After Alpesh Bhagwatkar showcased his project, we talked a bit about port knocking and nmap.

We briefly discussed AI (Apple Intelligence) and its public perception.

Harsh Khatri discussed AI agents and their impact on human tasks.

Ishan Sharma showcased a subtle animation he worked on at HackerRank.

Resources Shared During the Session:

Alpesh Bhagwatkar showcased two projects:

Siddharth Bhatia told us that he is organising the second Kurzgesagt Meetup Mumbai 2024 on the 19th of October, 2024! Do register and join in!

Siddharth Bhatia told us about Dev Dinner in Mumbai, India, an in-person hangout for anyone interested in Tech.

Harsh Kapadia shared

Mohit Gangwani shared

Mohit told us that he was using Laravel to build a web app to explore different technologies.

We unsuccessfully tried to figure out why Void Linux, a Linux distro built from the ground up without depending on any other distro, was required in the first place. We couldn’t find features that made a huge difference from the existing ones.

Siddharth Bhatia shared the OTC CatchUp #198 summary in podcast format using NotebookLM.

We discussed about how meetups, talks and podcasts are more about awareness of things going on in the industry rather than learning, because learning happens when we do stuff ourselves in opposition to just listening to people who’ve worked with it before.

Siddharth Bhatia told us how some companies create some products and/or features to attract users to their products, so that people can discover all the practically useful and cool features that their products have. He gave us an example of Obsidian, a note-taking application, that incorporated a graph feature that shows a network/graph of how all notes in the app are related. Siddharth said that he does not think that the feature has a lot of practical uses, but he and many others were attracted to Obsidian because of that feature and then fell in love with all the other cool features that Obsidian has to offer.

Rishit Dagli gave us some AI updates, told us about his Math courses and shared some of his experience interning with Qualqomm's AI research department.

Kaustubh Khavnekar shared his Amazon EKS ArgoCD boilerplate project, a boilerplate template which provides a quick starting point for creating an EKS cluster with ArgoCD pre-configured and other best practices.

The sixth OTC Talk was presented by Harsh Kapadia, titled "All about ELFs". You can find more details here: All about ELFs.

Siddharth Bhatia shared blogs related to ELF files and object file formats:

Bhavesh Kukreja had some trouble fixing sound drivers in Linux and shared his project on computer graphics: Computer Graphics Project.

Kaustubh Khavnekar shared a link to his blog repository: Kaustubh’s Blogs.

Rishi Dagli suggested using libcudf for certain tasks and shared a link to the RAPIDS AI project: RAPIDS AI.

Viranchee L shared a link to his dotfiles repository: Dotfiles.

Dheeraj Lalwani (Dhiru) shared a link to a gallery of processor cache effects: Processor Cache Effects.

We talked about some useful tools and resources:

We talked about new lines and line endings in different machines.

We talked about Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA), Competitive Programming and languages for solving DSA questions.

Harsh Kapadia asked for help with trying to figure out how Machine Code translates to Assembly when objdump is used to disassemble an executable.

Harsh Kapadia shared

Rishit Dagli shared and talked about

We talked about AGI and Superintelligence.

Pranil Chitre told us how he is liking the work he is doing at his Flutter internship and how he is liking the company’s work culture.

We watched a few funny videos

General Introductions

After Jia Harisinghani showcased her course project on Data Structure Animation, a few others shared some visualizers.

Bhavesh Kukreja shared some links to GNU Busybox printf.c, Tearing apart printf().

Rishit Dagli talked about how real-time rendering is not that computationally expensive after Jaden Furtado showcased his project updates.

Atharva discussed some projects he has worked on, which are also highlighted in his portfolio.

Jaden Furtado posed a question: Is success a result of hard work or luck?

vintus vinifera shared a problem statement about converting floor plans to 3D models using Blender for SIH 2024.

Harsh Kapadia showcased an example about string literals.

Jaden Furtado and Atharva discussed penetration testing techniques.

Rishit Dagli shared a problem he was facing with SSH access into a Slurm job.

Jia Harisinghani showcased her course project on Data Structure Animation. The project focuses on creating engaging animations and games to make learning and understanding data structures more interesting.

Jaden Furtado showcased updates to his project built using Vessel.js, which simulates all the components and systems of a ship.

Atharva showcased his movie streaming project, Orion View.

We completed 200 CatchUp sessions! We’re all so happy and proud!

We talked about programming languages like C, Go and Rust, mainly discussing the syntax, baked-in native functions and private variable access.

Alpesh Bhagwatkar asked for Partition Manager recommendations and Siddharth Bhatia recommended EaseUS’s free partition manager.

Jaden Furtado showcased a simulator he built using Vessel.js.

Harsh Kapadia asked for help with his ELF parsing project Parse ELF and Kartik Soneji was able to give him a hint that helped him work out an issue with the indexing to get the data of the Section Name String Table.

Himanshu Sharma talked about a blog he was writing about "Message streaming with Apache Kafka".

Chirag Nayyar talked about Kafka and how each cloud provider have their slightly different version of it.

Darshan Rander shared his finds of benchmarking multiple Dart backend frameworks.

Himanshu Sharma shared why he prefers to use Vivaldi as his primary browser - primarily he lived its tab management system.

We talked about Krutrim Cloud a cloud service provided by Ola a cab hiring service in India.

Darshan Rander shared Generative AI creates Doom game - it generates each frame using GenAI.

Aniket Kadam told us about his struggles with Autism and how he is trying to develop products for Neurodivergent people.

Tushar Shelke asked us how fast C++ is and which applications use it. C++ is fast and reliable-enough to be used in stock market trading applications and in Operating Systems (like Windows) to name a few places that use it extensively.

Tushar Shelke also asked what 'native' means in terms of compilation.

Aniket Kadam and Nida Shaikh talked about using Lua for scripting and Siddharth Bhatia shared LuaRT, a Windows programming framework for Lua.

Harsh Kapadia shared github.com/jasonmayes/Real-Time-Person-Removal.

Games

We talked about copyright and fair-use when someone talked about companies being able to scrape any content of the web to train LLMs.

Viranchee Lotia shared Intro to Large Language Models.

We talked about Commodore 64, Disk Operating System (DOS), Hercules CRT, Sinclair Computers and more.

We were surprised to learn that the hardware company ARM is actually an abbreviation for Advanced RISC Machines!

Siddharth Bhatia told us how XBMC was renamed to Kodi.

We talked a little about the history of AT&T.

Siddharth Bhatia took us through the first two editions of The MagPi, the RaspberryPi magazine.

Siddharth Bhatia shared Amber2, a custom theme for Windows Terminal. This is a sequel to his Amber-theme project.

Rishit Dagli shared his project NeRF-US, which removes Ultrasound Imaging artifacts from Neural Radiance Fields in the wild.

Aryan Pathak told us about the differences between Snaps and Flatpaks in Linux.

Dheeraj Lalwani asked us why a server running in a Docker container on an exported port does not work when the user tries connecting to it through the IP 0.0.0.0:8000 from the browser, when he has explicitly allowed any IP address to connect to the server at port 8000.

Aryan Pathak asked about higher education from the context of someone wanting to pursue a Master of Science in Computer Science. Harsh Kapadia, Pranav Dani and Viranchee L answered.

Cybersecurity

CPU pipeline

Pranav Dani showcased his RISC-V project where he built a 5+ stage pipeline in Verilog.

Anas Khan talked about his project which is like IMDB but for Youtube.

Darshan Rander shared that he recently gave a flutter talk in Pune and liked it because people paid attention.

We discussed why people choose where to work in Bangalore or Mumbai, and why. The general consensus was money.

Google was declared monopolistic and turns out more companies are under supervision for similar reasons.

We talked about Intel comments on the 13th and 14th generation K-SKU processor instability issue.

Aditya Oberai shared his experience of studying in a boarding school.

Alpesh Bhagwatkar shared his in progress portfolio website and asked for feedback.

jaden furtado shared the initial draft of his talk on cyber threats to satellites.

Rakesh Kumawat talked about his AI project which essentially took in a PDF as an input and he could then ask it questions. He used OpenAI to help with the AI-side of things and Pinecone as a Vector Database for easier AI-based text searching.

AWS

C

Harsh Kapadia shared Frogger but it’s ASCII art.

Kartik Soneji shared Tetris at the MIT Green Building.

We talked about Metaprogramming.

Nishant Goel asked about an issue that he was facing, where he was not able to upload files to his Amazon S3 bucket from his web app. Turns out that it was a CORS issue.

Siddharth Kaduskar showcased updates to his project 'Bunker', a centralized platform for professors to update attendance and for students to monitor their attendance records seamlessly.

Swapnil Borkar talked about how he feels that most people now a days don’t want to talk about work outside work.

Abhinav Singh asked how projects are planned and released.

We talked about TUI (Terminal UI) and how graphic protocols has evolved over time.

Siddharth Kaduskar talked about Fully Convolutional Network while sharing it’s research paper - Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation.

Darshan Rander talked about how he has setup his email forwarding service and what issues he faced while doing that such as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.

General Introductions

We had a discussion about compilers and different execution environments on chip.

Mohit Gangwani talked about GL.iNet routers and how they allow changing MAC addresses which is supposed to be used for privacy and security, but some people be exploit it for enabling cheat mechanisms in games.

We discussed the recent CrowdStrike driver issue that caused Windows BSoDs.

Dheeraj Lalwani shared the use of lava lamps in encryption by Cloudflare.

Intel’s 13th and 14th gen CPUs were reported to be crashing due to a bug in the microcode.

Poonam Jha shared a game UI design she created in Figma and asked for feedback.

Dheeraj Lalwani and Poonam Jha talked about job applications and negotiation tactics.

Dheeraj Lalwani highlighted the limitations of current text-to-video models, specifically noting their challenges with audio integration.

Dheeraj Lalwani shared insights on WebRTC and its implications for secure communication.

jaden furtado brought up the concerning issue of how some colleges and universities have been exposing student data online, raising questions about data privacy and protection.

Kartik Soneji sought suggestions for research topics, with a focus on offloading digital logic operations to analog computing.

Viranchee L is exploring job opportunities in compiler engineering and discussed potential internship opportunities.

Anil Harwani expressed that the end goal of education should not be solely about obtaining a job but also about personal growth and learning.

There was a debate on whether developer relations roles are more aligned with teaching and mentorship.

Rishit Dagli and Dheeraj Lalwani discussed the impact of referrals in job applications, noting that while startups tend to place higher weight on referrals, large MNCs may not prioritize them as much. Ultimately, the consensus was that referrals have a variable impact on job outcomes.

Nishant Goel talked about his transition to marketing. Dheeraj Lalwani asked him about how he came to that decision and how a product marketer contributes to the product.

Dheeraj Lalwani and Arvind Singharpuria talked about things that come along with working remotely, such as the social life issues that arise from it.

jaden furtado contemplated why he would want to pursue a master’s degree, as it relates to personal satisfaction. Pranav Daniw inquired about his expectations from it.

Aditya Oberai and Pranav Daniw discussed cameras and how the images they capture, regardless of the resolution, always have better depth and overall quality compared to photos taken with a phone.

jaden furtado and Anil Harwani talked about how once one gets to a senior position, taking days off becomes more difficult due to the responsibilities that come with the position.

Kartik Soneji talked about Rust and Disel. He also discussed NFTs and web3 since he is working with a company that is building a Web3-based marketplace.

Harsh Kapadia showcased his banana pie tool that he bought for a project.

The following links were shared in the meet:

Jaden Furtado showcased a website for malware detection where people could upload their files to check for malware traces.

Harsh Kapadia shared a case where one of the students from his college was scammed by a fake interviewer and made them run malicious code on their computer and copied their RSA keys.

Jaden Furtado talked about how a train received a software update over the internet and sadly the software is exposed publicly on the internet.

Aniket Kadam shared his experience of hiring interns and applying for jobs and how very small changes in the resume can be misinterpreted by the interviewer.

Sreekaran Srinath shared his experience of working at Boeing.

Pranav Dani showcased an instruction fetcher and a decoder that he wrote in Verilog for RISCV RV64IM.

We had a detailed discussion about AI, AGI and SSI.

Rishit Dagli discussed the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem, stating that models can only generate in-distribution (IID) data. However, he mentioned that it is mathematically possible to build OOD from IID by changing the conditions for the Gnedenko-Kolmogorov Central Limit theorem.

We talked about Windows Copilot+ PCs and the Recall feature and how it was ironically recalled.

Darshan shared that he is currently working on the front-end side of different products in his company.

jaden furtado talked about reverse shell and his cultural shocks in Singapore.

Harsh Kapadia showcased his banana pie tool that he bought for a project.

The following links were shared in the meet:

Himanshu Sharma and KrIshan Sharmaa Dave discussed React Native.

Ishan Sharma and Pranav Prasanna Dani pivoted the discussion towards Apple’s big announcements from WWDC, specifically entailing to "Apple Intelligence".

Harsh Kapadia shared A nice implementation of SIMD.

Harsh Kapadia, Aditya Oberai and Jay Kaku talked about Headless CMS and GitHub Copilot being used in companies.

Bhavesh Kukreja showcased a project where he wrote a C program to perform multiple operations on a BMP image.

Harsh Kapadia showcased a program to parse elf for a program. The intention was to understand how the parsing works.

Anas Khan and Darshan Rander talked about how difficult it becomes for a developer to work on things with all the restrictions in a MNC.

Alpesh Bhagwatkar talked about Cicada 3301 - a sequential puzzle posted by a user name "3301" on 4chan.

Alpesh Bhagwatkar asked for suggestions on what field he should specialize in, to which Kartik Soneji said to focus on fundamentals instead of going into a niche.

Pratik Thakare and Kartik Soneji talked about AWS RDS - AWS’s managed DB service.

Alpesh Bhagwatkar talked about a project in which he worked on built a IRS (Information Retrieval System).

Darshan Rander and Pratik Thakare talked about Solid and Next, and how much they affect React.js development as a lot of people from these teams work on React.

Jaden Furtado asked for opinions about either he should pursue PhD of continue with his Job.

Siddharth Bhatia talked about Google’s Search Algorithm Docs Leak.

Hritik Jaiswal shared Update on Inter-Availability Zone Data Transfer Pricing; TLDR - Azure will not charge for the data transfer across availability zones regardless of using private or public IPs on your Azure resources

Pratik Thakare talked about the project he was working on where he was trying to add features to his biometric attendance systems at his Gym.

We talked about AI services provided by Azure, it looked like they are building a collection of models and create an API surface for their customers to use which they can use to different models from different companies just by switching a switch.

Siddharth Bhatia shared a video titled Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks where he talks about his opinions on why he felt so.

Pratik Thakare talked about TTP - Time To Penis - it’s a metric on how much time gamers will take to make a penis in a game.

We talked about Google IO'24, we all were a bit disappointed as IO felt more like a corporate event than a tech event which had amazing tech announcements at the center of it.

OpenAI announced ChatGPT 4 and ChatGPT 4o just before the IO and took some light from Google IO.

Pranav Dani talked about his project where he implemented async I/O in file system of xv6.

Pranav Dani explained 5 Stage Pipeline of CPU that is -

Special thanks to Jaden Furtado for helping us host the CatchUp.

Rishit Dagli and Jaden Furtado discussed how to write research papers.

Anil Harwani told Pranav Dani the reason why he should not jump into just any job and wait for the optimal job.

Pranav Dani and Jaden Furtado had a discussion on the state of education and why it’s important to not burn yourself out with work.

Pratik Thakare shared that most ISPs doesn’t have a CGNAT over IPv6 hence you can publicly expose your system if someone got you IPv6 address.

Swastik Baranwal shared about how someone used him to bag some sponsors on GitHub - post on X.

We looked at an incident where two researcher who faked 83 CVEs as they didn’t had any proofs of them and they were very vague.

Pratik Thakare, Kartik Soneji and Darshan Rander talked about HTMX and CSR vs SSR.

Swapnil Borkar and Krishna Gadia talked about Why B2B brand building, marketing and sales is different from B2C.

Harsh Kapadia shared

Darshit Suratwala shared How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode.

Jaden Furtado shared his excellent Nullcon Berlin 2024: Hacking Trains talk.

Apple’s restrictions on external in-app purchase links.

Harsh Kapadia talked about how he was surprised to learn that the touch command in Linux was actually meant to change the timestamp of a file rather than to create a file.

Harsh Kapadia talked about Make.

We talked about what Language Server Protocols (LSPs) are and the functionality that they provide.

AI dump with Sreekaran Srinath's father, Darshit Suratwala, Saifuddin Saifee, Harsh Kapadia and more.

Darshan Rander gave us updates on his app Heartry, which is an app for Writers that can also be used as a note-taker.

Darshit Suratwala told us about Langtrace, an open-source observability tool that collects and analyzes traces and metrics to help one improve one’s LLM apps, that he is helping build at work.

Saifuddin Saifee showed us his project that won Mumbai Hacks 2024! It was a React.js based web app integrated with various LLMs, to complete various tasks like blog generation, quiz generation and more.

Pranav Dani told us about his xv6 Operating System assignment, which is a re-implementation of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s Unix Version 6 (v6).

We discussed what KVM and QEMU are, what their relationship is and whether they can be used independently.

Mohit Gangwani told us about Function Pointers in C

Mohit Gangwani shared nobuild, a library for writing build recipes in C.

Everything You Need to Know About inodes in Linux

We had a revelation when we figured out that C supports variable arguments.

Writing one’s own memory allocator function in C.

Micro VMs bridge the gap between full VMs and containers

The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

Preet Parekh showed us the upcoming second version of Devfolio's user profile page and took feedback from attendees to improve it.

Dheeraj Lalwani told us the need for daily standup meetings at his workplace.

Darshit Suratwala shared a project he is helping build at work, Langtrace, which is an open source observability software which lets one capture, debug and analyze traces and metrics from all applications that leverage LLM APIs, Vector Databases and LLM based frameworks.

Harsh Kapadia shared

Chirag Nayyar told us about Capital Expenditure (CapEx) vs Operating Expenses (OpEx).

Darshan Rander talked about how he really enjoyed giving a Flutter animations talk at Peerlist’s first Tech Talks meetup!

Rishit Dagli told us What are vectors and how do they apply to machine learning?

Rishit Dagli told us about animated PDFs. We didn’t know that was a thing!

Pratik Thakare talked about his operating system and environment.

Micro VMs vs (Full) VMs vs Containers

We talked about how it is really confusing for someone to figure out how to create a React.js project, because the official React.js docs suggest frameworks like Next.js and Remix instead of a way to bootstrap a React.js project like the now deprecated Create React App project did.

We saw the video of a Cloudflare employee being laid off without being told why.

Jaden Furtado told us how he found vulnerabilities in an application that he was filling out, which led to user data and documents being exposed to the internet through a database that was open to the internet.

Jaden Furtado showcased an update to his power grid simulation project, which is now able to run a small section of a power grid properly and can theoretically be drop-in solution for a real power grid as he is using the same protocols that actual power grids use, like Modbus, IEC 61850, MMS and GOOSE. He is going to open source his implementation as well.

Pratik Thakare told us how he is planning to build a server for a biometric attendance tracker to implement additional features.

Pranav Dani talked about xv6 an operating system developed for teaching by MIT.

He talking about its simple file system and is implementing small file optimization and truncate in the OS.

Darshan Rander asked Pranav Dani where someone can draw a line between file system, kernel and OS. Pranav Dani kernel sits between the file system and OS, a simple analogy would be kernel is the backend, while file system and OS are database and frontend respectively.

Pranav Dani also talked about kernel types.

We talked about the social life of people living in the US of the people in call.

Darshan Rander talked about Android Unknown Tracker alerts rollout to everyone a year later after announcing.

Color Representation Evolution: The conversation begins with an exploration of how colors on screens evolved from representing colors with other colors, to using complex numbers, and eventually to the adoption of sRGB.

One participant shares their discovery of a vulnerability in a website that leaked personal data of individuals applying for PhD positions, sparking a conversation on the implications of such vulnerabilities and the importance of cybersecurity.

There’s a mention of an anonymous source warning about government pressure to install backdoors in software projects, including the Tor project and Python, highlighting the ongoing challenges in maintaining privacy and security in open-source projects.

Recording Consent: A discussion unfolds around the ethical and legal considerations of recording calls without explicit consent from participants.

Job Market and Opportunities: Conversations touch upon the job market, with participants discussing the demand for certain products and the success of startups in raising funds.

Future Plans and Aspirations: The conversation briefly touches on personal aspirations, future plans, and the desire for change or relocation for career growth.

Security Protocols and Computing: There’s a technical discussion on protocols like DNP3 and IEC 61850, focusing on the challenges of implementing and updating these protocols in the context of cybersecurity for electric grids.

Harsh Kapadia and Ramyak Mehra discussed DMARC and SPF.

Harsh Kapadia shared the following links:

Mohit Gangwani shared a link to a project in Raylib.

Rishit Dagli and Siddharth Bhatia talked about different rendering techniques.

Harsh Kapadia talked about the malloc() and free() functions in C.

Ramyak Mehra and Siddharth Bhatia talked about the Win32 API.

We had a discussion about Backdoor found in xz liblzma.

Harsh Kapadia talked about the Linux exploit.

Researchers found an unfixable bug in Apple computers.

Aditya Oberai and Siddharth Bhatia discussed Hackathons and communities and why Delhi seems to have more hackathons in general.

The following links were shared in the meet:

Aniket Kadam joined in and talked about 100ms and its evolution as a platform including all the challenges they encountered.

Darshan Rander and Aniket Kadam discussed ways in which they document they document their code base and present errors to their users.

We talked about how DOJ sued Apple for monopolizing the smartphone market because it makes it harder for other companies to utilize system resources and potentially innovate.

Atharva Jadhav asked for advice on whether he should focus on AI/ML since his college curriculum is pushing him towards it.

Siddharth talked about Excel Anonymizer, which is a tool that he built that anonymizes Excel files.

Pranav Dani talked about Caches and its levels l1, l2, l3.

Siddharth Kaduskar talked about Bunker, which is an OCR-based attendance tracker that extracts lectures from the class timetable uploaded by users.

Kedar Karbele talked about his startup and the product he is building in the healthcare sector.

Himanshu Sharma shared that he is building a package for his company in Flutter where the clients can integrate it can use it to build their native apps.

Darshan Rander talked about immich an Open-source Google Photos replacement.

Kedar Karbele asked Rishit Dagli for guidance on how he should write research papers on AI and ML.

Pratik Thakare asked Kedar Karbele why he is using AWS for his startup which he could have gotten much more credits from Azure or GCP.

General Introduction

Bhavesh Kukreja talked about Scratch and a simple visual application that he built as a part of CS 50.

Ramyak Mehra and Darshan Rander had a contention about a beginner using Rust or C for development.

Building on the previous discussion, Harsh Kapadia shared an example of structure packing and caching.

We talked about the recent Linux kernel patch that improved the TCP performance by 40% as discussed in this youtube video: Google Patches Linux kernel with 40% TCP performance.

Harsh Kapadia shared a few links:

Anil Harwani and jaden furtado had a discussion about the paper: Creating Trust by Abolishing Hierarchies.

Pranav Dani and Anil Harwani talked about The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems.

Rishit Dagli and Anil Harwani talked about formal verification and how it’s used to verify the correctness of a program.

Pranav Dani talked about Cache Hierarchy, set associative cache, and how it’s used to reduce the latency of memory access.

Darshan Rander talked about how he was incorporating OAuth and Google Drive backups into his mobile application Heartry.

Darshan Rander and Swapnil Borkar talked about how most mobile application playstores take a share of the revenue, have a review process before releasing an update to an app and an automatic staged user rollout feature.

Swapnil Borkar shared his article User Testing to spot Insights & Inferences in Uber & Ola’s Design

Harsh Kapadia shared Google says it’ll stop charging fees to transfer data out of Google Cloud and mentioned that he was surprised because all Cloud providers generally like to lock customers into their technologies and impose high migration fees so that they think twice before moving data out of their services.

Rishit Dagli shared that some iPhone models have Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors to create a 3D map of one’s immediate surroundings. Some autonomous vehicles also use LiDAR to create a map of their surroundings.

Harsh Kapadia shared a few videos recounting AMD's history.

Viranchee Lotia shared his C++ learnings that he was learning from github.com/federico-busato/Modern-CPP-Programming.

Jimmy Palathingal told us how C++ does not have in-built Garbage Collection, so we have to implement it ourselves.

Rishit Dagli told us about various Mathematical terms while we were discussing Floating Point representation.

Rishit Dagli and Viranchee Lotia told us about various floating-point formats like bfloat16 and the way they differ in the number of bits to represent a Floating Point number.

CUDA vs ROCm: The Ongoing Battle for GPU Computing Supremacy

Kartik Soneji talked about his Capture The Flag (CTF) experience.

Self-driving cars

Harsh Kapadia shared Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

Siddharth Bhatia showcased a bunch of applications!

We talked about Google Stadia’s issues that led to its shutdown.

Rishit Dagli told us about K3s, a lightweight K8s distribution built for IoT and Edge Computing and about MicroK8s, a fully compliant K8s distribution with a smaller CPU and memory footprint than most others.

Akhil Sahu shared Open Props by Adam Argyle, which makes it easy and flexible to design components.

Harsh Kapadia talked about the different package managers available on Fedora-based distributions like CentOS, RHEL, Rocky Linux, etc.

Mohit Gangwani talked about an issue that he was facing with Webpack not rendering certain Tailwind CSS classes in the production build, but was working fine in the development version, while building a web site for his friend.

Harsh Kapadia shared

Ishan Sharma shared Reducing Instagram’s basic video compute time by 94 percent

Anas Khan shared a project HackerRank + VS Code, which lets you solve HackerRank challenges in VS Code and Ishan Sharma informed Anas that they hired the developer to work for them at HackerRank.

We talked about the differences between X11, Xorg and Wayland.

We talked about what Direct Memory Access (DMA) is and how it can be used to cheat in video games.

Verilog

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)

We looked up some binary data structures like the Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and Interrupt Vector Table (IVT or IDT) from volume two of the AMD64 Architecture Programmer’s Manual.

We talked about prefetching (Locality of reference - spatial and temporal) and speculative execution in CPUs.

Siddharth Bhatia showcased his project Anonymize_Excel, a Python script that anonymizes an Excel file and synthesizes new data in its place.

Ishan Sharma showcased a browser extension that he built at HackerRank which auto-fills job applications based on data stored on HackerRank and the answers that a user fills in applications.

General introductions.

Dheeraj Lalwani shared that he recently got a new job at HeyMarvin.

AI/ML Roadmap asked by Harshit Malang.

We had a short discussion about Mumbai Tech Week conducted in Jio World convention.

Harsh Kapadia shared a few links for some cloud platforms:

Darshit Suratwala and Harsh Kapadia had a chat about HashiCorp, its licensing changes and a discussion around the implications of these changes.

Harsh Kapadia referenced a few system design resources that he shared in one of the previous CatchUp sessions.

While sharing his project, Pranav Dani talked a bit about D3.js and difference between D3.js and Three.js.

Shubham Sah shared that he was a judge for a hackathon at Thakur College in Mumbai and since the theme was around AI, it was a bit difficult to differentiate between the functionalities of applications since most of the heavy lifting was done by the AI.

Ramyak Mehra talked about a talk on the topic "Why Rust isn’t the best choice for your next project" that he will be giving in Banglore in March.

We had a good discussion about different video codecs and how some are good for storing while some are good for transmitting data.

Kartik Soneji and jaden furtado talked about a CTF (Capture The Flag) event that they participated in.

Darshan Rander shared that he was exploring gRPC and how it can be used in a microservices architecture.

Pranav Dani showcased his visualisation project, a React app that uses D3.js to visualise data from NYC Open Data. The visualizations include bar charts, histograms, and scatterplots to represent numerical and categorical attributes.

Shubham Sah talked about his development journey at his work.

Shubham Sah added that companies now-a-days are looking to cut down on costs and so are mainly hiring more experienced people, as they won’t have to invest as many resources and as much time in training as a fresh graduate.

Harsh Kapadia shared

Kaustubh Khavnekar shared that he was starting with a new project at work after finishing the previous one and that the new project extensively involves Terraform and PowerShell scripts.

Dheeraj Lalwani talked about his successful interview experience.

Copyrighting and artists getting paid

Nice! 😉

Kartik Soneji talked about The 2024 MITRE Engenuity Embedded Capture the Flag Competition. He showed us his preliminary design to show us how people think while designing solutions that others will try to exploit.

Arryaan Jain talked about comparing audio codecs, earphone and headphone quality, and his disappointment with the lack of Dynamic Equalizers in mobile phones in the current market.

Mobile processors

Abhigyan Bafna shared his Artificial Intelligence and Data Science WhatsApp group where interesting discussions on AI take place.

We talked about htmx, a library that allows one to use HTML attributes to trigger requests and swap HTML responses in the DOM.

We talked about HTTP/3 and QUIC, and discussed how QUIC, which is based on UDP, still has reliability and streams built into it.

Kartik Soneji helped debug a Chrome Extension visibility issue that Kedar Karbele was facing. It turned out to be a CSS z-index issue.

Harsh Kapadia shared a few resources for System Design.

Kartik Soneji shared an extremely important lesson with us: Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking

Saifuddin Saifee asked if it matters whether one uses DDR4 or DDR5 memory for normal development use cases and the general consensus was that it doesn’t matter.

Abhigyan Bafna showcased Apna Ghar, a project management system which aims to reduce friction between interior designers, customers and contractors. The app revolves around the interior designer and provides a Kanban task manager with integrated customer feedback, 3D display of the status of the project and AI generated rooms.

Jaden Furtado told us about some of the security testing he has being doing on power plants.

Wilfred Almeida asked about anonymous e-mails and we came to a consensus that it would be very difficult to do that due to all major e-mail providers requiring DMARC, SPF, DKIM and e-mail reputation provisions.

Darshan Rander talked about Android disallowing users from accessing app data files through file managers.

Nishant Goel asked for advice to build a web site for a product that he was planning to build.

Ishan Sharma talked about how he was building a browser extension for HackerRank, learning Swift in his spare time to get into iOS development and building a project for experimenting with IoT devices.

We discussed our disdain over the 'Rent-to-Own' and 'You’ll Own Nothing' principles that companies have been pushing.

Rishit Dagli talked about his paper DiffuseRAW: End-to-End Generative RAW Image Processing for Low-Light Images

Siddharth Kaduskar discussed his decision of going for Masters.

General Introduction.

We discussed coding practices and the "correct way" to write code.

Wilfred Almeida asked how one should go about reading and understanding code.

jaden furtado shared a link to a video on Adventures at AMD: Origin of Threadripper where Anil Gohan was featured.

We had discussions about how good OTC Meetup #4 turned out to be.

Pranav Dani and Mohit Gangwani discussed the job situation in the US market.

We discussed about attending how one could manage college lectures and travel time for undergrads.

We talked about the internship and full-time opportunities in India for freshers.

Raghav Rathi, Aditya Oberai and Pranav Dani discussed developing reading habits and provided some good book suggestions as well.

Book suggestions as discussed in the catchup:

We discussed the purpose of meetups and why the crowd might be generally young.

We discussed some concerns about the Google Cloud Platform shutting down eventually based on recent events.

Microsoft was worth more than Apple for a split second.

Pranav Dani, Aditya Oberai and Ramyak Mehra talked about Steam OS, Nintendo Switch, games and a few devices.

Ramyak Mehra and Aditya Oberai discussed the differences while giving interviews for companies in India vs in the US.

Kartik Soneji talked about PostCSS and how it is not really needed with new features added to CSS.

Anas Khan talked about using Isolate for Sandbox for securely executing untrusted programs for his Leetcode clone project.

Mohit Gangwani asked about process scheduling and Kartik Soneji explained the difference between scheduling for jobs and scheduling for interactive processes.

Kartik Soneji discussed his Pull Request github.com/unkeyed/unkey/pull/474.

We discussed Carrier lock situation in US, wifi, ISP, data situation. Local data plans purchse and resale.

Mohit Gangwani asked about dual booting Linux vs using VMs and Kartik Soneji recommended Docker to him. Kartik also explained what Docker is.

Rishit Dagli shared his blog An Intuitive Look at the Dynamics of SGD.

We discussed how to choose which CPU to buy.

Threads and processes

Harsh Kapadia shared Most 16-year-olds don’t have servers in their rooms, which is a blog by a 16-year old who set up a Dell server, created and self-hosted a clone of Replit for his projects on the server, created and self-hosted a social media platform on the server with real users and a bunch of other projects.

Harsh Kapadia shared a few videos from Gamers Nexus, a hardware review channel he really likes.

Harsh Kapadia shared What is the difference between clang (and LLVM) and gcc/g++?

Harsh Kapadia shared What is the use of typedef \[in C]?

Buffer Overflow, Segmentation Faults and Exceptions

Everything in Linux is a file.

Aditya Oberai shared his blog Embracing Aloneness, which goes into the difference between 'aloneness' and 'loneliness', and talks about learning to enjoy 'me, myself and I'.

Endianness

Kartik Soneji shared Fast Inverse Square Root — A Quake III Algorithm and Ramyak Mehra shared The Truth about the Fast Inverse Square Root on the N64.

Kartik Soneji told us the story of creation of MariaDB by forking MySQL just before Oracle acquired it.

Kartik Soneji told us how the C programming language got a Boolean datatype and the story behind the need for stdbool.h.

Swapnil Borkar talked about how Germany and the US have the same work visa requirements but how German laws favour the employee.

Kartik Soneji talked about his Computer Network Design exam.

Rishit Dagli shared his research paper DiffuseRAW: End-to-End Generative RAW Image Processing for Low-Light Images

Kartik Soneji shared