OTC CatchUp Summaries

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

Chirag Nayyar shared that he will be redesigning and publishing articles on a blog site made in WordPress.

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

Swapnil Borkar and Krishna Gadia asked Rishit Dagli if he had seen any effects of slow markets in Canada.

Kartik Soneji talked about his Cloud Computing Exam and we tried answering some of the questions.

Kartik Soneji talked about Proxmox a tool for virtualization.

Rishit Dagli said that he feels learning AWS and other things in school/university is not right, they should be learned by an individual as they are easier and might not need much assistance from professors.

Chirag Nayyar told us that he has been gearing up to give four AWS and GCP certifications.

Harsh Kapadia shared videos on Google Gemini AI.

Chirag Nayyar and Ishan Sharma recommended reading ByteByteGo’s blog and watching ByteByteGo’s YouTube Videos as well.

Harsh Kapadia shared a few miscellaneous videos.

Databases

Aditya Oberai shared Is DevRel Just A Fad?

Darshan Soni and Om Pawaskar showcased a Java and MySQL employee management portal.

Aryan Pathak talked about the heirechy of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

We talked about he someone can triangulate someone via their IP addresses.

jaden furtado shared How To Hack A Yacht by Stephan Gerling talk at Hack.lu, 2018.

We talk about DoH (DNS over HTTPs) and DoT (DNS over TLS) and their what are pros and cons.

Harsh Kapadia shared AoC (Advent of Code) a series of small programming puzzles that can be solved in any language.

jaden furtado shared MiniCPS - SWaT which is to simulate a subprocess of a Water Treatment testbed.

Darshan Rander and Mohit Gangwani talked about Kali NetHunter which is a kernel built specifically built for pen-testing on a mobile device with a suite of apps.

Harsh Kapadia and Rishit Dagli talked about how much they respect low-level programmers after they had a subject in your course for that.

Rishit Dagli was surprised to know that Mumbai University teaches frameworks in college instead of teaching Computer Science.

Harsh Kapadia shared an Instagram Reel on how we need to use conformation bias to look at things positively rather than negatively.

Harsh Kapadia talked about Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) Parameters.

Harsh Kapadia shared a list of the top 500 Supercomuters.

Mohit Gangwani talked about display panel technologies TN, IPS and VA.

We talked about Display Port vs HDMI.

Industrial communication protocols

Kartik Soneji talked about how helpful Text Fragments are, as they help with highlighting the most important parts of a web page.

Harsh Kapadia shared The high-stakes war on AdBlockers in reference to Google confirming that they will disable uBlock Origin in Chrome in 2024.

Harsh Kapadia mentioned that Wireguard can be used to create one’s own Virtual Private Network (VPN).

AMD Threadripper

Kartik Soneji told us about OpenStack, a set of open source software components that provide common services for cloud infrastructure and about LocalStack, a service that allows local simulation, development and testing of Cloud services before actual infrastructure deployment on the Cloud.

We talked about Internationalis(z)ing Code.

Kartik Soneji told us Why You Can’t Name A File CON In Windows.

Kartik Soneji explained the differences and intricacies between Hard Links and Soft/Symbolic Links (Symlinks).

We all were surprised to learn from Kartik Soneji that the touch command in Linux that most people use to create a new file is actually used to change file access and modification timestamps to the current system timestamp! touch just creates new file if the file didn’t already exist!

We talked about Dithering and Anti-Aliasing.

Kartik Soneji poked fun at Harsh Kapadia for forgetting that a NULL character is represented by 0x00 and not 0x0A(which represents a Line Feed character).

We talked about CPU bound vs I/O bound tasks.

Harsh Kapadia shared his experimentation with Badger 2040, where he wrote small scripts to display profiles and marquee names across the screen.

Philip Durbin joined us and told us about the open source research data repository software, Dataverse, that he had been working on for the past 11 years.

Ishan Sharma and Philip Durbin told us about Steve Jobs' resignation from Apple and his subsequent ventures with NeXT and Pixar.

We talked about the OpenAI and Sam Altman drama.

Text messaging

Mohit Gangwani shared Downloading Images from Russian Satellite.

Security and privacy

Computer Networking

Harsh Kapadia shared Microsoft Reveals Custom 128-Core Arm Datacenter CPU, Massive Maia 100 GPU Designed for AI.

Aditya Oberai shared Hour of Code.

Aditya Oberai shared his talk Understanding Role-Based Access Control with ASP.NET Web APIs for .NET Conf 2023.

Harsh Kapadia talked about Google confirming they will disable uBlock Origin in Chrome in 2024.

Harsh Kapadia talked about DuckDuckGo’s new web browser.

We talked about how Google admitted to paying Apple 36% of Safari search revenue in exchange for default status on all of Apple’s devices.

Aditya Oberai and Ishan Sharma talked about how Epic Games created a Fortnite parody campaign video of Apple’s 1984 Macintosh commercial to protest against the monopolistic practices of Apple’s App Store.

We discussed the basics of Data Mining and Data Warehousing.

Mohit Gangwani asked for projects to build in the Networking domain.

Mohit Gangwani was talking about Win32 API and Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU).

Wilfred Almeida shared Breakpoint 2023: High performance computing for crypto

Anil Harwani talked about the importance of taking the time to plan one’s days, weeks, months and years.

Anil Harwani recommended watching

Harsh Kapadia shared The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Harsh Kapadia talked about his in-person GitHub Universe 2023 experience.

Mohit Gangwani talked about display panel technologies TN, IPS and VA.

Darshan Rander talked about Windows Forms, which is a GUI library part of the .NET ecosystem to make applications for desktops, tablets and laptops.

We OTC Talks #5 by Pranav Dani on RAFT - a consensus algorithm.

Bhavesh Kukreja asked what does DevOps engineers do?

Darshan Rander shared why he doesn’t want to work in DevOps at the current moment.

Darshan Rander and Aditya Oberai talked about how different it feels when you join workforce from college and how things changes.

Darshan Rander and Aditya Oberai talked about their experience while applying as speaker for multiple conferences.

Atmaj Koppikar talked about his final year project in which he made a Blockchain based certificate generator.

Mohit Gangwani shared new restrictions in valorant which requires a lot of things in your systems to run the game.

Mohit Gangwani, Darshan Rander and Wilfred Almeida talked about Java and PHP more hate than it deserves.

Swapnil Borkar talked about the Tech Roast show and how long procedure was for selection.

Rushil asked about how he can get internships.

People who sat for college placements tests of Barclays shared that they got rejection mails soon after they had submitted their tests.

Mohit Gangwani shared about NIC Bonding.

Darshan Rander shared "How Cloudflare mitigated yet another Okta compromise" by Cloudflare.

Darshan Rander shared about a new project he might work on syncing playlists among YTMusic and Spotify.

Darshan Rander talked MixT which is special designed for having consistency in distributed Databases.

Darshit Suratwala shared about a project he is currently working which would ease out deployment of Blockchains on Cloud platforms.

General introductions.

Pankaj Jaiswal talked about using RASA chatbots.

Harsh Kapadia talked about how he came to know that apart from Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision Language Models (VLMs) also exist and they combine visuals with some textual input to provide an output.

We talked about how a front end client app might slow down if a lot of API calls are made at the same time or if a lot of them are cascaded together.

In the same vein of talking about improving performance, we also had a discussion on efficient querying practices in SQL.

We discussed where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) lie in applications.

Assembly Language

Aditya Oberai talked about Appwrite's rebranding.

Wilfred Almeida asked Dheeraj Lalwani about his experience of working at Fold.

Mohit Gangwani shared how he broke his Windows operating system by installing Docker.

Wilfred Almeida asked Dheeraj Lalwani how the code deployment works at Fold.

Dheeraj Lalwani shared about the things that need to be done before starting to code on a feature at his company.

Wilfred Almeida asked Dheeraj Lalwani about how did he get job at Fold.

Mohit Gangwani asked Wilfred Almeida about the Solana Mumbai Hacker House event.

Chirag Nayyar asked about DevFest event.

Wilfred Almeida asked Chirag Nayyar how Google Cloud Platform is disregarded even though other cloud providers are providing same offerings.

Chirag Nayyar shared how Google’s tensor chip is slow.

Bhavesh Kukreja shared that he is working on a TODO project and he is having difficulty segregating the code into different files.

Ashfaq gave his introduction.

Mohit Gangwani asked about how Anil Harwani started joining Our Tech Community’s catchup sessions.

Bhavesh Kukreja shared how his problem-solving skills have improved by working on projects.

Mohit Gangwani asked Ashfaq in which company does he work

Dheeraj Lalwani asked Viranchee L how his master’s degree is going and about his progress.

Dheeraj Lalwani shared about the perks he gets at Fold.

Viranchee L asked Ashfaq about his work.

Ashfaq asked Dheeraj Lalwani about the structure of Fold.

Ashfaq asked about how does Fold make money.

Harsh Kapadia shared a Digital Design & Computer Architecture course that Anil Harwani shared with him.

Next-Gen CPU Acceleration: AVX For Generative AI

Prathamesh Karambelkar shared Your Don’t Know JS Yet.

Harsh Kapadia shared his notes on how an Operating System boots.

Harsh Kapadia also shared Web in Native Assembly (Linux x86_64)

Harsh Kapadia talked about how deleting a single character involves three characters (\b \b).

Chirag Nayyar shared

CPU vs GPU vs TPU vs DPU vs QPU vs FPGA

Cloud Repatriation

Google’s Project IDX is a new web-based editor that is in waitlist.

Wilfred Almeida told us how Planetscale operates without Foreign Keys.

Siddharth Bhatia shared Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse.

Anas Khan asked if he could use Google Maps API for free.

Darshan Rander discussed about issues with Fold App.

Mohit Gangwani asked about how asynchronous operations work in JavaScript if it is single-threaded.

Siddharth Bhatia shared An open letter to our community, a blog by Unity talking about them going back on their pricing changes after wide dissent.

Anushka Bhagchandani shared her experience of working at Myntra.

Harsh Kapadia discussed the assignment of his University of Operating System lecture, in which he has to capture keystrokes using kernel.

Harsh Kapadia talked about his learnings about different/equivalent Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) like x86, x86_64, amd64, IA64, etc.

Anil Harwani shared the cross-licensing agreement between AMD and Intel.

Bhavesh asked for suggestions on how to understand the lower-level architecture to understand how things are working in higher-level programming languages.

Siddharth Bhatia and Chirag Bachani asked for suggestions to participate in a Hackathon.

Abhigyan Bafna talked about working with his teammates on a college project.

Kartik Soneji asked about reviews of The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)[National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)^].

General introductions.

We talked about how much someone should handhold a beginner.

Jaden Furtado talked about his experience of giving a talk on NLP in college.

We talked about the preferences of people using Git CLI and other tools around it.

Dheeraj Lalwani shared what issues fold.money is facing as Credit card providers are not cooperating much with them.

Dheeraj Lalwani shared how he got his interview at fold.money.

Siddharth Bhatia showcased Install C which as the name suggests helps users to install C easily.

General introductions.

Prateek Pardeshi talked about using Spring Boot at work versus using Node.js.

We talked about why starting programming with Java rather than Python could be better. The general consensus was that Python spoils people with its in-built libraries and doesn’t expose them to a standard Object-Oriented Programming paradigm early on, which makes it difficult to adapt to such projects in the real world.

We talked about 6 Reasons Why Companies Don’t Update Their Technology

Harsh Kapadia talked about his project of turning a laptop into a server and the Dynamic DNS utility that he built for his project.

We talked about what Emacs is - an extensible, customizable text editor that can a do a lot more than just text editing. Some even consider it an entire Operating System!

Harsh Kapadia shared three satires on Tech-enthusiast stereotypes.

Harsh Kapadia also shared

We talked about the difference between User Interface (UI) and Heads-Up Display (HUD) in games.

We talked about how Java decodes Unicode characters in programs before starting lexical translation.

General introductions.

Harsh Kapadia shared Putting the "You" in CPU.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Darshit Suratwala shared Wudpecker to take automatic meeting notes and Rishit Dagli shared Firefly for the same.

Mohit Gangwani shared Network Chuck and LiveOverflow YouTube channels to learn more about Computer Networking and Cyber Security.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) turned 35!

Jaden Furtado shared guidance-ai/guidance, a guidance language for controlling large language models.

Ayush Chauhan shared Anomaly Detection and Classification in Predictive Maintenance Tasks with Zero Initial Training.

Harsh Kapadia talked about how he converted his spare laptop into a server.

Rishit Dagli showcased Recite, a new machine-learning runtime and a new training technique to fine-tune Multimodal text models. He particularly showed how they transcribe speech from thousands of languages and also translate the audio.

General introductions.

Siddharth Bhatia talked about an installer he is building to install GCC on Windows, to make the process easier for college students.

An experience at a Web3 conference, where it is difficult to understand where the satire starts and ends: I go to ABSURD tech conference.

Anil Harwani told us to remember two things

Anil Harwani shared Breaking the x86 Instruction Set

We talked about Protection Rings (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3)

We talked about the basics of Zenbleed, an AMD Zen architectural bug.

We talked about the basics of AMD Inception, a Zen CPU exploit.

We talked about HashiCorp changing the license for Terraform.

Aditya Oberai talked about his Alt Text Generator alttext.in, which helps make the internet more accessible.

We joked about how companies love TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and FLAs (Four Letter Acronyms).

We talked about good Tech conferences

Jaden Furtado told us that he will be speaking at NullCon Goa 2023 on The Curious Case Of The Rogue SOAR.

Readings suggested by Anil Harwani

Videos suggested by Anil Harwani

We talked about the LTT Screwdriver and tools from iFixit and Wera Tools.

Anil Harwani told us about the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate, which was an argument where Tanenbaum was trying to prove why a Microkernel architecture (Tanenbaum’s OS Minix had that architecture.) is better than a Monolithic Kernel architecture that Torvald’s Linux has.

Harsh Kapadia and Jaden Furtado discussed their liking for Asciidoctor, a Static Site Generator that Kartik Soneji got them hooked onto.

Cloudflare issues

We talked about how Google was DDoSing Root DNS servers.

Hussein Nasser and Arpit Bhayani were suggested for good Systems content.

Prathamesh Karambelkar told us that he was using Formik at work to build forms in React.js.

Kaustubh Khavnekar talked about his work and how he deals with burn out.

Harsh Kapadia talked about his Dotfiles repository.

We discussed how everyone uses documentation, articles, blogs and YouTube videos to learn new things.

We talked about the Linus Tech Tips fiasco.

Kartik Soneji discussed about IEC 61850, (International Electrotechnical Commission standard 61850), an international standard to define a common communication protocol for IEDs (Intelligent Electronic Devices) at electrical substations. IEC is the newest standard, designed to replace Modbus and DNP3, but hasn’t seen widespread adoption.

We discussed reports that ChatGPT could be costing over USD 700k per day to run (source). We also calculated the monthly and yearly cash burn if the figures were true.

That lead to a discussion about the various AI chatbots being developed by companies:

Wilfred Almeida asked for recommendations to get started with security testing and ethical hacking. Kartik Soneji recommend starting with LiveOverflow’s channel.
Other recommendations:

The discussion on cybersecurity led to vulnerability reporting, and the .well-known folder, specifically the .well-known/security.txt.

Wilfred Almeida asked about ways to get a fully sponsored masters out of India. The suggestions were Germany, or having a company like L&T sponsor you.

We helped Wilfred Almeida with a Swelt issue about binding onClick listeners to buttons.

Bhavesh asked: A lil question, should i focus on DSA (Python) and studies both or just study for first semester? Also recommend something else if possible The general consensus was feel free to participate in Competitive Programming competitions if you are interested, but focus on your semester subjects first, they will help you learn core concepts that will help you thoughout your career.

Aditya Oberai discussed about the AppWrite Cloud public beta, and their launch to General Availability.

We discussed how good OTC MeetUp #3 was! People enjoyed the talks and all the conversations! We want to thank all the people who attended, our speakers and our partners!

Krishana Dave and Somya Barwa asked about JP Morgan & Chase's reduction in hiring and Deutsche Bank's increase in hiring.

Laptop restrictions and releases in India

Harsh Kapadia asked about how people have combatted burning out at their workplace and Tushar Nankani talked about how he worked a lot initially and then used the time afterwards to interact with people and learn from them. He participated in more activities and started looking at things broadly.

We touched upon a distributed agreement protocol called Paxos.

Real-time collaboration in text editors

Harsh Kapadia explained the basics of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) Nodes Per Socket (NPS) and how he had to configure that in BIOS settings for Network throughput measurements.

Anil Harwani talked about how it is important to know latency numbers for various operations on the Operating System level and told us to go through Latency numbers every programmer should know.

Harsh Kapadia shared a video of someone hacking a game by making modifications to it in-memory: I Hacked a Game from my Childhood (for REVENGE)

Harsh Kapadia told Nikshita Karkera the importance attending meetups (a good way to learn people’s experiences and the industry) and how it becomes easier to interact with new people after doing it a few times.

Harsh Kapadia explained Pull Requests (PRs) to Chirag Nayyar and talked about what they mean, why they are required, why should one put in the effort into opening PRs, how it benefits both parties involved (the project’s maintainers and the contributor) and how people abuse Hacktoberfest.

Chirag Nayyar showed us his openprofile.dev Linux Foundation contribution dashboard and Rishit Dagli showed us devstats.cncf.io.

We talked about Red Hat’s Source Code Lockout Spells Disaster for CentOS Alternatives: Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux in Trouble?

Chirag Nayyar talked about Google Daydream View, Google Stadia, Amazon DeepComposer and Amazon Fire Phone.

Rishit Dagli's hackathon experience

We talked about Cloudflare DNS issues that someone was facing. We informed them about the previous discussions we’ve had on Cloudflare’s DNS issues.

Siddharth Kaduskar showcased his project Bunker, an OCR-based attendance tracker that extracts lectures from the class timetable uploaded by users.

Siddharth Kaduskar shared CS50 Course on AI.

Ishan Sharma our PowerPoint Wizard gave a run through of his slides and how he made those for React Nexus.

Wilfred Almeida asked Rishit Dagli how he transpile TypeScript to WASM.

Chirag Nayyar shared about his sabbatical and how it has impacted his life.

Harsh Kapadia asked Chirag Nayyar what he thought of before taking sabbatical. To which he replied -

Harsh Kapadia asked, how can someone if they should stick or leave a company?

Darshan Rander asked wether he should get Google One subcription or self-host Immich (Google Photos alternative). The opinions are as follows -

Jay Kaku shared about Istio, it’s a service mesh which helps Kubernetes and traditional workloads to improve discoverablity.

Chirag Nayyar talked about ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and why it’s so confusing and how PUE (Power usage effectiveness) is calculated of a Data center.

Chirag Nayyar shared about how data center tiers are classified.

Chirag Nayyar talked about cloud repatriation and why people are considering to go away from cloud.

Sejal Jain talked about her conversion from an intern to a full-time employee at Zomato and shared her experience working with PHP, Go, MySQL and DynamoDB.

Viranchee L talked about his experience building security features using C, C++ and Python as an intern at Qualcomm.

Harsh Kapadia talked about how Kartik Soneji improved the GitHub Actions workflow of the OTC CatchUp GitHub repository that sends reminder and joining Tweets and Telegram messages for OTC CatchUp sessions.

Jaden Furtado talked about how his team qualified for the second round of a CTF CISS 2022.

Preet Parekh talked about an issue where an update query (using Painless) to around 10 million Elasticsearch documents was taking around eight minutes to reflect to the end user!

Wilfred Almeida talked about how some ISPs use the Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) protocol to authenticate users.

Harsh Kapadia talked about how Captive Portals are used to display WiFi login screens when a user logs into a WiFi network for the first time.

Wilfred Almeida talked about his issues with transactions on Supabase.

Wilfred Almeida asked whether anyone had used Proxmox, a Virtualization management software like VMware, as he was facing issues with SeaBIOS and UEFI.

Kubernetes

Harsh Kapadia talked about how a lot of people expressed their disdain for the lack of empathy in a Tweet thread by Dukaan’s CEO marketing a product by boasting about laying off employees and for dismissing concerns for laid off employees in a very offhand way.

Harsh Kapadia talked about his experimentation with Vim plugins. He started using vim-plug as his plugin manager and the EditorConfig and the vim-shfmt plugins.

Harsh Kapadia talked about how the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) of a server motherboard gets its own IP and has its own web interface to help configure the motherboard (turning power on or off, updating BIOS and board firmware, getting a GUI for the machine, etc.) and how he used ipmitool to re-gain lost access to the BMC by re-configuring a password for the default admin user.

Harsh Kapadia talked about his Networking experiment at his internship at AMD, where he had to configure two servers and a Mellanox SN2100 Switch to be able to achieve a throughput of 100 Gbps over Ethernet.

We talked a little about InfiniBand as well, which uses the concept of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) to speed up Networking. It is an alternative to Ethernet.

Siddharth Kaduskar showcased his attendance manager project that he built using Express.js and React.js. He is using NanoNets for OCR.

Rishi Setpal shared his React.js projects.

Dheeraj Lalwani explained how he implemented Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) using Web API’s from Firebase instead of SDK.

We discussed the autosave feature on a lot of IDEs.

Harsh Kapadia and Rishit Dagli helped Wilfred Almeida to add sign off in his commit messages.

Ramyak Mehra said that he finds Rust pretty complex and the build times are very long.

Wilfred Almeida shared how he broke his TP-Link WiFi router by flashing the wrong custom firmware.

Ramyak Mehra talked about his ISP: Net Plus where any other Net Plus customer can log in and connect to his WiFi.

Saifuddin Saifee asked how he can set up a Remote Desktop where a single Windows server could be shared between multiple people.

Darshan Rander talked about Intermediate Graphics Library (IGL) by Meta.

Darshan Rander talked about what issues he faced while working with a Custom Design System in Flutter.

Darshan Rander, Ramyak Mehra and Wilfred Almeida talked about the reusability of widgets in Flutter and how it becomes quite difficult to manage lines of code in a single file.

We talked about Threads and how it accelerated the network effect by leveraging its Instagram users.

We conducted OTC Talks #4 - Files, DAGs and the Yardstick, with Krishna Gadia as our speaker.

General introductions.

Harsh Kapadia talked about how he created a basic Git Server that uses SSH.

We talked about Self-XSS, where users are persuaded to run malicious code on their browsers by social engineering.

We discussed why someone would save JWT in the database and how it kills the purpose of not reading the database to get user information.

Wilfred Almeida asked if it is a good idea to store user status (blocked, admin, etc) in the JWT token.

Ayush Singh asked for help to deploy his React.js and Express.js web app on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for a company and we suggested deploying it using a platform like Vercel as it is much easier to deploy and manage.

Kartik Soneji explained how company licensing works in India.

Wilfred Almeida asked how he can build a system where he can find the number of times a request was made by the user and charge them accordingly.

We talked about why companies don’t update their internal tools and why they are incentivized not to update them.

General introductions.

Sampras D’Souza told us that he is working on Engineering Experience and Productivity, to make it easier for Developers at his company to build products.

Darshit Suratwala showed us a Grafana dashboard that his company uses in its product, to produce graphs and other visuals for telemetry data collected from Prometheus, which periodically collects data from various data sources.

Harsh Kapadia shared Seeing the World through Your Eyes, an AI project that constructs a 3D image of the scene in front of a person through reflections seen in their eyes in a portrait image.

Shiva Charan shared Vision and Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE), an instruction-guided task that navigates the environment based on commands given by a user.

Darshan Rander talked about his Flutter Pull Request fix: wrong expansion tile shape assignment.

Kartik Soneji showed us various ways in which GitHub enables comparisons between new and old images in a Pull Request.

Harsh Kapadia asked Kartik Soneji to review his setup Bash script for his dotfiles repository.

Anush Veeranala showed us how customizable and powerful GNU Emacs is, with calendars and planners built into it. It is considered to be an Operating System in itself!

Anush Veeranala also showed us his Operating System GNU Guix, which is highly customizable.

We talked about What is the difference between clang (and LLVM) and gcc / g++?

Kartik Soneji told us about the difference between Curl and Wget and also showcased how the --libcurl flag in Curl outputs pure C code that can be used to do the action the user requested through the command.

Kartik Soneji showed us how GCC and Clang compile and optimize their code, by showing us Assembly output in godbolt.org. He also showed us why Python is inefficient, due to repeated unoptimized function calls and other design-related tradeoffs.

Darshit Suratwala shared that he recently gave a talk on the topic - "Blockchain Goes Kubernetes" at KCD Mumbai meetup.

Mohit Gangwani and Harsh Kapadia discussed some really good learning resources for Computer Networking.

Wilfred Almeida gave a talk at KCD Mumbai about "How to Not-Mess-Up Production" server based on his experiences during a meeting.

We talked about KMS (Key Management Services) and how companies handle licensing for their products through their servers.

We discussed how SPEC CPU benchmarks are used to compare the CPUs objectively.

Reddit will apparently start charging hefty costs for third-party API access.

Reddit threatening moderators to re-open their communities.

Pranil Chitre shared some platforms which provide hosting for free:

Anas Khan and Pranil Chitre talked about Arch Linux and Fedora.

Sarah recently took part in the Appwrite Hackathon and built Saathi.

Harsh Kapadia suggested Joel check out MLH (Major League Hacking) and their hackathons.

Jay Kaku talked about flip-flops and how he is writing code in Verilog in HDLBits to get comfortable in writing Verilog.

We discussed what an Ethereum Virtual Machine (eVM) is.

Harsh Kapadia and Rishit Dagli answered - Should one check the ROI of going to conferences?

General introductions.

Reddit's impact on ecosystem/community.

We talked about the new Apple Vision Pro and how comfortable it is to wear.

We discussed the recent developments in the VR field.

Mohit shared information about Gigabyte’s recent launch of a new server product and their partnership with Nvidia. Video link: Gigabyte’s Server Launch.

Rishit Dagli shared his experiences with Math exams, specifically in Multi-Variable Calculus.

Dheeraj Lalwani asked Rishit Dagli about the teaching methodology at the University of Toronto.

We discussed about clearing backlogs and dropping out from engineering (which is a very important decision that should not be taken lightly, and completing your degree is more beneficial in most cases).

Tushar Nankani shared the scale, quality and professionalism of MumbaiHacks.

Recommended Books and Resources were shared.

Vatsal Patel met Harsh Kapadia in Austin in the given week.

Vatsal shared that his workplace — Activision uses a Centralized Version Control System (CVCS) called Perforce.

We discussed about Million — The virtual DOM replacement for React.

We talked about Mumbai Hacks when Tushar Nankani joined in briefly during the hackathon.

Darshit Suratwala shared that he would be talking on Blockchain at KCD Mumbai Meetup.

Ishan Sharma and Darshit Suratwala talked about JSConf India.

We discussed options for hosting web apps with a backend specifically for fixing OTC’s website after Deta Cloud was shut down.

Aditya Oberai's tweet about Appwite winning the golden kitty awards was up on New York’s Times Square.

Aditya Oberai and Rishit Dagli talked about visas and passports with the benefits of having dual citizenship.

Most discussions were woven around JSConf India and Harsh Kapadia's internship experience.

Wilfred Almeida and Pranav Dani discussed how some pirated websites also have good infrastructure.

We talked about Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin and its flaws.

We discussed how one can adjust their Twitter feed using the three-dot menu to avoid irrelevant content on the feed.

Pranav Dani shared that some routers allow content filtering, blocking keywords, URLs and domains.

Wilfred Almeida talked about hosting and load balancing.

We talked about the Browser Company, based on this tweet and how it looks potentially useful and aesthetically pleasing.

Aditya Oberai shared his premise and thought process behind his recent blog on ARCC about Why I’m Skeptical Of Web3: An Outsider’s Perspective.

Harsh Kapadia shared his experience of building his development machine with an AMD EPYC Milan.

Darshan Rander showcased a game that he built using Flutter and Flame engine.