Note For older summaries, please visit our Twitter account (@OurTechComm).

About OTC CatchUp

OTC CatchUps are weekly informal sessions involving project showcases and technical discussions. They are held every Saturday from 10:30 PM IST. Join in!

Note Showcase a project on OTC CatchUp! It can be anything from a simple Calculator to an extremely complex project. We appreciate them all!

Summaries

OTC CatchUp #208

Date: 02-11-2024

Duration: 4 hrs 16 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  2. Atharva

  3. Bhavesh Kukreja

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Pranav Prasanna Dani

  6. Viral Soni

  7. jaden furtado

  8. Arthur Smile

  9. Gajraj Singh

  10. Kartik Patel

  11. Kaushal Patil

  12. KsrX Duke

  13. Raghav Rathi

  14. Sejal Jain

  15. Tarun 24

  16. Vaseem Akram

  17. Vintus Vinifera

Meet Screenshot

Meet #208 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #204

Date: 05-10-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 53 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

    • Technologies used: AWS (EKS, EC2, Route 53, IAM and more), Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD

    • Project repository: github.com/KMK-Git/eks-argocd-starter

    • Blog explainer: Amazon EKS ArgoCD boilerplate

    • This project led to a very informative and fun discussion with Kaustubh, Darshit Suratwala, Harsh Kapadia and others.

      • Kaustubh’s project’s high level project architecture

        • In his project, Kaustubh is using Terraform to provision the overarching AWS infrastructure (AWS EKS cluster service and all other AWS services).

        • He then uses Helm charts to define Kubernetes addons inside the provisioned AWS EKS infrastructure.

        • Instead of using Helm CLI or ArgoCD to provision the Helm charts for Kubernetes addons, Kaustubh uses Terraform to deploy the Helm charts.

          • According to Kaustubh, this is the better way to automate Helm chart deployments if one wants to stick to Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

          • ArgoCD is not used for Kubernetes addons because the Helm charts use Terraform outputs as inputs to the chart definition.

        • Once this is done, ArgoCD is used to manage continuous deployments (CD) of containerized applications inside the EKS cluster. The Kubernetes objects for these applications are again written in Helm charts. ArgoCD syncs the Helm chart definitions in Git repos with the objects deployed in the cluster.

      • Ansible vs. Terraform: What Are the Differences?

      • We talked about resolving infrastructure issues like intermittent network losses, connection dropping issues, etc.

        • Telnet, Netcat, etc.

      • Harsh shared How NAT traversal works.

      • Darshit shared his repository (a take-home job interview assignment) which does something similar to what Kaustubh did: github.com/DSdatsme/golang-api-k8s-ci-cd

      • Along with Rishit Dagli, we also touched upon interviews, job availabilities, etc.

Attendees

  1. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  2. Chirag Nayyar

  3. Darshit Suratwala

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  6. Mohit Gangwani

  7. Pranav Prasanna Dani

  8. Rishit Dagli

  9. Siddharth Bhatia

  10. Siddharth Kaduskar

  11. Wilfred Almeida

  12. Jaden Furtado

  13. Prajwal Dhule

  14. KsrX Duke

  15. Numair Sayed

  16. Pranit Malhotra

  17. Raghav Rathi

  18. Ram Naik

  19. Rohan Hazari

  20. Vaseem Akram

  21. theutopianvision

  22. vintus vinifera

Meet Screenshot

Meet #204 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #202

Date: 21-09-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 56 mins

Topics Discusssed

Attendees

  1. Anas Khan

  2. Aniket Kadam

  3. Bhavesh Kukreja

  4. Darshan Rander

  5. Dheeraj Lalwani

  6. Hardik Raheja

  7. Harsh Kapadia

  8. Kartik Soneji

  9. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  10. Pranav Prasanna Dani

  11. Pranil Chitre

  12. Rishit Dagli

  13. Prajwal Dhule

  14. Aarush

  15. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  16. Jash Malhotra

  17. Nishant Goel

  18. Raghav Rathi

  19. Ram Naik

  20. Rishi Setpal

  21. Sejal Jain

  22. Somin Ranjan

  23. Srinath Chettiar

  24. Tarun

  25. Vintus Vinifera

Meet Screenshot

Meet #202 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #201

Date: 14-09-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 41 mins

Topics Discusssed

  • 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.

    • His movie streaming project uses a third party API to fetch movie data.

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

    • Harsh Kapadia mentioned that luck is temporary, but hard work makes success last.

    • Rishit Dagli suggested that we could explore this philosophical concept and create an experiment to verify it.

  • 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.

    • He defined two functions: one that returns a string literal and another that returns an array of characters (returns starting address of the array).

    • Since the array is local to the function, it is destroyed after the function returns, causing a segmentation fault. In contrast, the string literal is stored in the read-only section of memory, allowing it to be returned without causing a fault.

  • Jaden Furtado and Atharva discussed penetration testing techniques.

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

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

    • He added middleware to handle requests and responses using Flask and WebSockets, based on the IEC 61131 standard.

  • Atharva showcased his movie streaming project, Orion View.

Attendees

  1. Abhinav Singh

  2. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  3. Arvind Singharpuria

  4. Atharva

  5. Bhavesh Kukreja

  6. Darshan Rander

  7. Dheeraj Lalwani (Dhiru)

  8. Harsh Kapadia

  9. Jaden Furtado

  10. Jia Harisinghani

  11. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  12. Mohit Gangwani

  13. Naufil Asar

  14. Pranav Dani

  15. Pranav Prasanna Dani

  16. Pratik Thakare

  17. Ramyak Mehra

  18. Rishit Dagli

  19. Shubham Yadav

  20. AARUSH

  21. Clash Mania

  22. Harshit Malang

  23. Hmm

  24. Janvi Matani

  25. KsrX Duke

  26. Manav Takhtani

  27. Piyush

  28. Prakhar Gupta

  29. Priyani Jain

  30. Pruthviraj कचाटे

  31. Raj Singh

  32. Ram Naik

  33. Sarvesh Ramane

  34. Saumil Bhatkar

  35. Swapnil Ambad

  36. vintus vinifera

Meet Screenshot

Meet #201 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #200

Date: 07-09-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 30 mins

Topics Discusssed

  • 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.

    • Kartik Soneji isn’t the biggest fan of Rust because of the inverted variable declaration syntax (let val:i32 = 5;) and no easy way to access private variables outside their scope for debugging purposes.

    • Ramyak Mehra and Kartik had a prolonged discussion on Rust not having a few features natively built-into the language and thus having to rely on external cargo packages.

    • Ramyak told us that private variables can be accessed outside of their scope using 'Unsage Rust', countering Kartik’s claims that it’s impossible in Rust.

    • Wilfred Almeida told us about Rust’s Some and None keywords.

    • Jaden Furtado shared C skill issue; how the White House is wrong.

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

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

Attendees

  1. Anas Khan

  2. Aniket Kadam

  3. Aryan Nayak

  4. Bhavesh Kukreja

  5. Darshan Rander

  6. Dheeraj Lalwani

  7. Hardik Raheja

  8. Harsh Kapadia

  9. Himanshu Sharma

  10. Jia Harisinghani

  11. Kartik Soneji

  12. Mohit Gangwani

  13. Naufil Asar

  14. Pranav Prasanna Dani

  15. Prajwal Dhule

  16. Ramyak Mehra

  17. Rishit Dagli

  18. Sanni Prasad

  19. Siddharth Bhatia

  20. Sreekaran Srinath

  21. Tushar Nankani

  22. Wilfred Almeida

  23. Jaden Furtado

  24. Aarush

  25. Aaryan Khan

  26. Abhinav Singh

  27. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  28. Alpesh Bhgt

  29. Chintan Patel

  30. Deep Patel

  31. Hashish Dubey

  32. KsrX Duke

  33. Muskan Deep Jindal

  34. Mamta

  35. Nisarg Anand

  36. Prakhar Gupta

  37. Saee

  38. Swapnil Ambad

  39. Tarun 24

  40. Yash

  41. Aditya Patil

Meet Screenshot

Meet #200 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #198

Date: 24-08-2024

Duration: 4 hrs 28 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

Meet Screenshot

Oops, we forgot to take a screenshot this time


OTC CatchUp #197

Date: 17-08-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 41 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • We helped Dheeraj remember that 0.0.0.0 is a wildcard that indicates that any IP address is acceptable, so entering 0.0.0.0:8000 in a browser doesn’t actually point to any IP address, which is why the browser is not able to reach the intended server.

    • Dheeraj also expressed his interest in Docker networking, which is why Harsh Kapadia shared Docker Networking Crash Course and github.com/HarshKapadia2/mac-ip-routing.

  • 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.

    • How much money is required?

      • Unfortunately tons. Provisions for around a Crore should be made.

      • If they’re taking loans, people usually take ~Rs. 50 Lakh as an education loan.

    • How important is one’s CGPA?

      • Extremely important, especially if one is going to pursue higher education directly after college.

    • Which countries require the GRE?

      • A lot of them.

      • On an average, it takes about three to four months to prepare.

    • Why is USA so popular? What about Germany and Ireland?

      • USA has some of the world’s best universities and a lot of well-paying jobs.

      • The main issue with Germany is the language barrier.

    • How much do research papers matter?

      • A lot, but only good and proper ones. Papers written for the heck of it don’t matter.

    • Can one skip Leetcode if they’re pursuing a Master’s degree?

      • Definitely not. All interviews unfortunately include Leetcode-type questions.

  • Cybersecurity

  • CPU pipeline

    • We discussed the differnces between RISC and CISC architectures.

    • Every instruction in RISC-V is 32 bits long and program counter increments by 4 (bytes) so that it can point to the next instruction.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani asked about the CPU pipeline and how it works. Pranav Dani explained the concept of a pipeline and how each stage and its registers play import part in the pipeline.

    • Pranav Dani shared an online simulator for RISC-V to explain the pipeline stages.

    • We talked about branch prediction and how one would go about implementing it in a pipeline.

Show and Tell

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

    • He executed a few programs compiled for RISC-V on his verilog pipeline.

    • The processor in its current form talks directly with the memory over AXI4 protocol, but he plans to add a cache in the future.

Meet Screenshot

Oops, we forgot to take a screenshot this time


OTC CatchUp #196

Date: 10-08-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 33 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • This could have big implications on how Google operates in the future. Each product might have to be spun off into a separate divison.

    • Parth Puranik suggested that Perplexity could be a good alternative to Google Search due to its unique approach to search.

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

    • Gamer’s Nexus video about Intel.

    • We discussed how power consumption might be correlated to different ISAs, and how the micro-architecture of the processor could be optimised to reduce power consumption.

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

    • He suggested that a kid learns to be independent and self-reliant in a boarding school earlier than in the case of a traditional schooling system.

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

    • He was facing issues with custom fonts in his portfolio.

    • Darshan Rander suggested him to make it stable for desktop first and then move to mobile.

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

    • He talked about how satellites are vulnerable to cyber attacks and how they can be protected.

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Anas Khan

  3. Ayush Chauhan

  4. Bhavesh Kukreja

  5. Darshan Rander

  6. Dheeraj Lalwani

  7. Harsh Kapadia

  8. Mohit Gangwani

  9. Pranav Dani

  10. Pratik Thakare

  11. Rishit Dagli

  12. Siddharth Bhatia

  13. Wilfred Almeida

  14. jaden furtado

  15. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  16. Aniket Kadam

  17. Ayush Singh Chauhan

  18. KsrX Duke

  19. Nishant Goel

  20. Parth Puranik

  21. Raghav Rathi

  22. Sarthak

  23. Tarun 24

  24. Vanshika jain

Meet Screenshot

Meet #196 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #195

Date: 03-08-2024

Duration: 5 hrs 13 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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

    • Graphics

    • Turbo C

      • Siddharth also told us about a project that started porting Borland’s Turbo C source code to GNU GCC

        • The project has since fallen out of date and doesn’t compile on a modern Ubuntu 22 installation. Siddharth contacted the project’s creator to ask if they could update the project to make it compatible with the current version of gcc.

        • With Kartik Soneji's help, we understood the author’s reply.

        • Essentially, the author said that since Turbo C was written in an era of 16 bit computers, programs expected int to be 16 bits and long to be 32 bits, etc.
          In the past, the project inserted preprocessor directives like #define int int16_t before the standard libraries were loaded to patch the code into behaving correctly on modern systems.

        • This used to work, but the modern standard C library has evolved a lot, making it more complex and prone to breaking from blind patches like these.
          The project author believes while it’s possible to work around the specific issues, it’s a loosing battle since patching the standard library is not a viable long term strategy.

      • Siddharth was enthusiastic about continuing the project by exploring alternative approaches like a transpiler that translated old TurboC code into code compatible with a modern C standard like C17 or C23.

  • 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.

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

    • He showed us how he implemented various CNN, Clustering and Regression algorithms to be able to identify table columns and rows in attendance sheets without using a service like Nanonets.

Attendees

  1. Aaditya Nitin

  2. Abhigyan Bafna

  3. Bhavesh Kukreja

  4. Chirag Nayyar

  5. Darshan Rander

  6. Darshit Suratwala

  7. Dheeraj Lalwani

  8. Harsh Kapadia

  9. Jaden Furtado

  10. Kartik Soneji

  11. Mohit Gangwani

  12. Rishit Dagli

  13. Siddharth Bhatia

  14. Siddharth Kaduskar

  15. Swapnil Borkar

  16. Viranchee L

  17. jaden furtado

  18. Abhinav Singh

  19. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  20. Anil Harwani

  21. Arthur Smile

  22. Gajraj Singh

  23. Isha Madlani

  24. Lokesh Chachad

  25. Nishant Goel

  26. Pranav Prasanna

  27. Rakesh Kumawat

  28. Sahil Bansal

  29. Sarvesh Huddar

  30. Shashank Gupta

  31. Tarun

  32. Manav Methwani

Meet Screenshot

Meet #195 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #194

Date: 27-07-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 49 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Bhavesh Kukreja

  3. Darshan Rander

  4. Darshit Suratwala

  5. Dheeraj Lalwani

  6. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  7. Poonam Jha

  8. Pranav Prasanna Dani

  9. Pratik Thakare

  10. Ramyak Mehra

  11. Rishit Dagli

  12. Siddharth Kaduskar

  13. Swapnil Borkar

  14. Viranchee L

  15. jaden furtado

  16. Abhinav Singh

  17. Akhil Sahu

  18. Alpesh Bhgt

  19. Aniket Kadam

  20. Anil Gohan

  21. Arthur Smile

  22. Isha Madlani

  23. KsrX Duke

  24. Rakesh Kumawat

  25. Rohan Advani

  26. Sahil Bansal

  27. Sarthak

  28. Tarun 24

Meet Screenshot

Meet #194 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #193

Date: 20-07-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 41 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General Introductions

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

    • CPU, GPU and NPU. GPUs run kernels, which are like functions that are meant to run on GPUs for parallel processing.

    • Viranchee L talked about how he is learning about compilers for ML applications.

  • 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 how different modules invloved in the computer that runs a game can be banned by the game server.

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

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

    • Lava Lamp Encryption: Cloudflare uses a wall of lava lamps to generate random numbers for creating encryption keys.

  • 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.

Attendees

  1. Bhavesh Kukreja

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Darshit Suratwala

  4. Dheeraj Lalwani

  5. Harsh Kapadia

  6. Mohit Gangwani

  7. Poonam Jha

  8. Pranav Dani

  9. Pranav Prasanna Dani

  10. Viranchee L

  11. Wilfred Almeida

  12. Aayushi

  13. Abhinav Singh

  14. Anil Harwani

  15. Ayush Singh

  16. KsrX Duke

  17. Rakesh Kumawat

  18. Riggle Tech

  19. Sarthak

  20. Satish Baradiya

  21. Shubham Yadav

  22. Tushar Shelke

  23. Sridhar Katta

Meet Screenshot

Meet #193 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #192

Date: 13-07-2024

Duration: 4 hrs 45 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • A discussion ensued about the distinction between text-to-speech and text-to-audio technologies.

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

    • There was a conversation about various authentication methods and their relevance to digital security.

  • 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.

    • The group discussed the benefits and challenges of analog computing, including hardware mapping, quantization, and hardware utilization.

  • 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.

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Bhavesh Kukreja

  3. Chirag Nayyar

  4. Darshit Suratwala

  5. Dheeraj Lalwani

  6. Kartik Soneji

  7. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  8. Mohit Gangwani

  9. Pranav Prasanna Dani

  10. Rishit Dagli

  11. Siddharth Bhatia

  12. Siddharth Kaduskar

  13. Viranchee L

  14. Wilfred Almeida

  15. jaden furtado

  16. Abhinav Singh

  17. Aditya Singh

  18. Akhil Sahu

  19. Anil Harwani

  20. Hrishikesh Dhuri

  21. Nishant Goel

  22. Raghav Rathi

  23. Rakesh Kumawat

  24. Ram Naik

  25. Reet Batra

  26. jay aslaliya

Meet Screenshot

Meet #192 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #191

Date: 06-07-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 09 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • Nishant Goel also discussed his startup, a podcast hosting platform, although he didn’t provide any specific details about it. He also mentioned the framework they were using for the platform.

    • We talked a bit about how selecting a framework might be related to how comfortable people are with it.

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

    • The main reason for this is that remote workers often have limited opportunities for social interaction outside of work, as they don’t have the same level of face-to-face interaction with colleagues that office workers do.

    • Later in the meeting, Aditya Oberai brought up this topic and emphasized the importance of making conscious efforts to maintain a social life while working remotely.

  • 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.

    • Anil Harwani further talked about the aspects to consider - one related to the responsibilities of your job, and the other related to your interests and working on the projects that you see worth in.

    • He emphasized that to pursue the things that truly matter to you, you may need to make certain sacrifices and put in extra effort.

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Bhavesh Kukreja

  3. Dheeraj Lalwani

  4. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  5. Mohit Gangwani

  6. Pranav Dani

  7. Ramyak Mehra

  8. Rishit Dagli

  9. Shubham Sah

  10. Wilfred Almeida

  11. jaden furtado

  12. Aniket Kadam

  13. Anil Harwani

  14. Arvind Singharpuria

  15. Hrishikesh Dhuri

  16. Krishana Dave

  17. Kuwar Kapur

  18. Nishant Goel

  19. Prakhar Sharma

  20. Rakesh Kumawat

  21. Hemant Vardani

Meet Screenshot

Meet #191 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #190

Date: 29-06-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 53 mins

Topics Discussed

Show and Tell

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

    • The instruction fetcher fetches instructions from memory which talks over the AXI4 protocol and the decoder decodes the instructions and prints it in the terminal.

Meet Screenshot

Meet #190 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #189

Date: 22-06-2024

Duration: 4 hrs 12 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • Aniket Kadam talked about how AI is bad at consistency, while Rishit Dagli tried to counter the argument by suggesting that it is a math problem and can be solved eventually.

    • We had an interesting discussion about realism and how AI can replicate most of the already-produced art.

      • Building on the previous discussion, we tapped into the philosophical topic of what work is derivative and what is original.

    • jaden furtado shared a drawing that he made and asked the group to identify which was made by him and which one was made by AI.

  • 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.

    • He also shared a blog post where he wrote about a part of this topic.

  • 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.

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OTC CatchUp #188

Date: 15-06-2024

Duration: 4 hrs 41 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • Himanshu Sharma is working on a project where he is migrating stuff to React Native.

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

    • Apple heavily integrated AI into their products, potentially killing the business of a few companies like Grammarly.

    • We also talked about the design choices surrounding the Magic Mouse.

  • Harsh Kapadia shared A nice implementation of SIMD.

    • Pranav Prasanna Dani then talked about GPUs, SIMD, CUDA, and Vector and Scalar processing.

    • We also touched upon the topic of F16 and F32, which are 16 and 32-bit floating point numbers respectively.

    • We then talked about AMD’s MI300X and Nvidia’s counterp art.

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

    • We talked about Copilot+ PCs introduced by Microsoft and the recall feature, which was ironically recalled due to some privacy and security concerns.

Show and Tell

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

    • He used the Sobel operator to detect edges in the image.

    • He also talked about the Canny edge detector.

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

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OTC CatchUp #187

Date: 09-06-2024

Duration: 5 hrs 56 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #186

Date: 01-06-2024

Duration: 2 hrs 45 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • General concenseus was to try to do both, if that’s not possible then choose PhD.

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

    • It was a big leak and later Google came forward and confirmed that the leaked documents were correct.

  • 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.

    • He had to put it on hold as the data required for him to add features was not available by the service.

  • 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.

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OTC CatchUp #185

Date: 25-05-2024

Duration: 2 hrs 20 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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 -

    • Fetch: Read instructions from memory.

    • Decode: Decode instructions and access registers.

    • Execute: Perform ALU operations.

    • Memory Access: Load and store values between memory and registers.

    • Write-Back: Complete the instruction execution and update registers

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OTC CatchUp #184

Date: 18-05-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 40 mins

Topics Discussed

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

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

    • We also discussed the importance of proper citations.

    • We compared industry white papers to academic papers; their differences and Rishit Dagli expressed his reasoning behind preference towards academia.

  • 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.

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OTC CatchUp #183

Date: 11-05-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 23 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • In SSR it’s difficult to cache since the data shown can have user info which might be something you don’t want to leak of other users.

    • In SSR your frontend is in your backend which causes issues in deciding what you should and should not send to user to process.

    • In CSR you offload a lot of processing on client which further decreases your dependency on server.

    • In CSR you have a faster FCP (Firt Contentful Paint).

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OTC CatchUp #182

Date: 04-05-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 18 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

Attendees

  1. Bhavesh Kukreja

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Darshit Suratwala

  4. Dheeraj Lalwani

  5. Harsh Kapadia

  6. Jaden Furtado

  7. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  8. Krishna Gadia

  9. Ninad Naik

  10. Pratik Thakare

  11. Saifuddin Saifee

  12. Sreekaran Srinath

  13. Swapnil Borkar

  14. Adithyan

  15. Anil Harwani

  16. Huzefa Dohadwala

  17. Ishaan Parsone

  18. Krishana Dave

  19. Nishant Goel

  20. Rahul Gandla

  21. Rithvik Rajesh

  22. Karthik Nair

  23. Tarun Chettiar

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OTC CatchUp #181

Date: 27-04-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 40 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

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

Attendees

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OTC CatchUp #180

Date: 20-04-2024

Duration: 5 hrs 38 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

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OTC CatchUp #179

Date: 13-04-2024

Duration: 4 hrs 34 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • Some are struggling to have friends while some have a good amount of friends.

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

    • It alerts you if anyone has put a tracker on you on your phone.

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Bhavesh Kukreja

  3. Chirag Nayyar

  4. Darshan Rander

  5. Harsh Kapadia

  6. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  7. Pranav Dani

  8. Pratik Thakare

  9. Ramyak Mehra

  10. Swapnil Borkar

  11. Viranchee L

  12. jaden furtado

  13. Adarsh Kesharwani

  14. Amol Gawade

  15. Hrishikesh Dhuri

  16. Ishaan Parsone

  17. Jainisha Pathak

  18. Raghav Rathi

  19. Rahul Gandla

  20. Ram Naik

  21. Sahil Bansal

  22. Umang Malhotra

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OTC CatchUp #178

Date: 06-04-2024

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • It’s noted that sRGB became a standard because it allowed for the representation of individual colors in a way that was previously not possible, which was crucial for the development of color TVs and screen technology.

  • 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.

    • This leads to a detailed explanation of a feature being developed to notify participants of recording, addressing legal issues faced by a company when their client used their recording tool without informing 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.

    • There’s also a discussion on the value of education in Singapore versus the US, and considerations around pursuing higher education like PhDs.

  • 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.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #177

Date: 30-03-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 41 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Aryan Nayak

  3. Bhavesh Kukreja

  4. Chirag Nayyar

  5. Hardik Raheja

  6. Harsh Kapadia

  7. Mohit Gangwani

  8. Pranav Dani

  9. Pratik Thakare

  10. Ramyak Mehra

  11. Rishit Dagli

  12. Siddharth Bhatia

  13. Swapnil Borkar

  14. jaden furtado

  15. Anil Harwani

  16. Atharva Jadhav

  17. Bhagyashree Bhagyalaxmi

  18. Bishal Pal

  19. Jash Malhotra

  20. Rahul Gandla

  21. Ram Naik

  22. Rishi Setpal

  23. Rithvik r

  24. Sahil Bansal

  25. Yuxuan Huang (Sean)

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OTC CatchUp #176

Date: 23-03-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 12 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • 100ms is a platform that provides video conferencing APIs for developers to build video conferencing applications. They have many features like recording, streaming, and a lot of other things that are needed for a video conferencing platform.

    • Harsh Kapadia thought that since it is a video infrastructure, the amount of work would have been deterministic, but Aniket Kadam mentioned the fact that their work isn’t still complete since they keep adding new features and functionalities based on customer requirements.

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

    • Aniket Kadam talked about how an average user mostly reads compiler errors instead of following the documentation. So they push most of the information in the compiler errors to make the users aware.

      • He also mentioned that you need to design around the documentation.

  • 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.

    • Aniket Kadam suggested that Android seems like a bunch of completed Jira tickets, and less like a polished consumer product, whereas iOS seems to be a bit more coherent and polished.

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

    • Most people suggested that he should choose what he likes based on exploration and not what the curriculum is pushing him toward.

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

    • He described the working of the tool including the usage of presidio and how it generates unique fake data for the columns in the Excel file.

    • He also talked about Busybox, which is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file.

  • 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.

    • He also then talked about TableNet, which is a deep learning model for end-to-end table detection and tabular data extraction.

Attendees

  1. Darshan Rander

  2. Harsh Kapadia

  3. Mohit Gangwani

  4. Pranav Dani

  5. Pratik Thakare

  6. Siddharth Bhatia

  7. Siddharth Kaduskar

  8. Viranchee L

  9. Wilfred Almeida

  10. Yohan Gupta

  11. jaden furtado

  12. Aniket Kadam

  13. Anil Harwani

  14. Atharva Jadhav

  15. Chirag Bachani

  16. Marvin’s Notetaker

  17. Mohammed Nudman Raza Shaikh

  18. Shubham Yadav

  19. tarun chettiar

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OTC CatchUp #175

Date: 16-03-2024

Duration: 3 hrs 8 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • He talked about all the compliances he has to understand while building the product.

  • 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 explained why he thinks it a bad idea as it makes no sense for a package to have Flutter engine inside just for a few screens and tree-shaking unused packages would be impossible.

  • 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.

    • Kedar Karbele said that he preferred AWS because of familiarity and resources available online.

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OTC CatchUp #174

Date: 09-03-2024

Duration: 2 hrs 50 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • C teaches you about memory management whereas Rust abstracts it away and from the POV of a beginner, they won’t be able to learn things without actually experimenting.

    • Ramyak Mehra mentioned that Rust gives warnings and directions to the developer while compiling whereas C doesn’t.

    • jaden furtado tried to pitch in with a new perspective by talking about the intent behind learning a language and how it should be based on the problem that the developer wants to solve.

  • 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.

    • Anil Harwani mentioned SNP (Secure Nested Paging) and how it’s a hardware feature that’s being used to secure the hypervisor.

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

    • The paper talks about using message passing between cores and how it’s a better approach than shared memory/cache coherency.

    • Anil Harwani said that the thing about research is that the ideas are good but one needs to evaluate them in the real world and suggest how much performance can improve, which is the main reason behind why most chip makers stick to cache coherency.

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

    • There’s nothing like fully secure programs and the best that we can do is to make it as secure as possible.

    • Securing something should be less than 10% of the cost of the thing that’s being secured.

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

    • L1 cache is parallel and L2 cache is serial, which is why L1 cache is faster than L2 cache due to more cycles required for accessing requisite data.

    • He also talked about the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) and how it’s used to reduce the latency of page table access.

    • We also talked about speculative execution, branch prediction and potential pitfalls.

    • We discussed Linearizability, Sequential Consistency, and how they’re used to reason about concurrent programs.

      • We also discussed how Serializability and sequential consistency are different. Some database terminologies are also used to reason about concurrent programs.

Attendees

  1. Bhavesh Kukreja

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Darshit Suratwala

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  6. Kedar Karbele

  7. Mohit Gangwani

  8. Pranav Dani

  9. Ramyak Mehra

  10. Rishit Dagli

  11. Saifuddin Saifee

  12. Swapnil Borkar

  13. Viranchee L

  14. Wilfred Almeida

  15. jaden furtado

  16. Adithyan

  17. Akhil Sahu

  18. Anil Harwani

  19. Atharva Jadhav

  20. AtharvaJ

  21. Gauri Khanolkar

  22. Jash Malhotra

  23. Kartik Patel

  24. Krishana Dave

  25. Raghav Rathi

  26. Rishi Setpal

  27. Vishal Dubey

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OTC CatchUp #173

Date: 02-03-2024

Duration: 6 hrs 8 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Bhavesh Kukreja

  3. Darshan Rander

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Kartik Soneji

  6. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  7. Krishna Gadia

  8. Mohit Gangwani

  9. Pranav Dani

  10. Rishit Dagli

  11. Swapnil Borkar

  12. Tanay Kamath

  13. Viranchee Lotia

  14. Wilfred Almeida

  15. Jaden Furtado

  16. Anil Harwani

  17. Jash Malhotra

  18. Jimmy Palathingal

  19. Krishana Dave

  20. Priyansh Salian

  21. Raghav Rathi

  22. Rahul Gavhar

  23. Sarvesh Yogi

  24. Karthik Nair

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OTC CatchUp #172

Date: 24-02-2024

Duration: 5 hrs 14 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Discussed

  • 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.

    • He showed us how his design was inspired by the Arc browser and the CSS behind it.

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OTC CatchUp #171

Date: 17-02-2024

Duration: 3 hrs

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

Attendees

  1. Bhavesh Kukreja

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Darshit Suratwala

  4. Dheeraj Lalwani

  5. Hardik Raheja

  6. Harsh Kapadia

  7. Kartik Soneji

  8. Kedar Karbele

  9. Mohit Gangwani

  10. Pranav Dani

  11. Ramyak Mehra

  12. Shubham Sah

  13. Siddharth Kaduskar

  14. Swapnil Borkar

  15. Wilfred Almeida

  16. jaden furtado

  17. Anil Harwani

  18. Badimi Prabodh

  19. Gagan Nagu

  20. Gauri Khanolkar

  21. Harshit Malang

  22. Kartik Patel

  23. Mizuhara Kakkashi

  24. Rahul Gandla

  25. Roshni Mandhani

  26. Rushil Shrivastava

  27. Sparsh Sharma

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OTC CatchUp #170

Date: 10-02-2024

Duration: 4 hrs 21 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Shubham Sah talked about his development journey at his work.

    • He told us about an Okta access token issue that he solved by implementing a cache for tokens and a quarantined area for revoked tokens.

    • He said that he made the mistake of starting to code as soon as he got the requirements of his task, without properly understanding the context of the job and without consolidating all the requirements into a cohesive plan. He advised everyone to collect all requirements and plan properly, to avoid repetitive and unnecessary work.

    • He also told us about their Quality Assurance (QA) process, which involves Smoke Testing, Unit Testing and more. They also use a platform called SonarQube for linting and Static Code Analysis.

    • Log4j got a mention as well and we’ve talked about the major security incident that affected loads of projects using the library in OTC CatchUp #70 and #58.

  • 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.

    • To combat this, Shubham suggested that legitimate Open Source contributions really help, because a lot of experience is gained by setting up complicated project infrastructure and adding a fix into a codebase. This experience can then also be shown in interviews, as a qualifying metric.

  • 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

    • In this age when AI is able to generate data and art because of being trained on publicly available data, there is a question of copyright and license infringement that is very fair to ask.

    • There was discussion that we don’t have to pay to listen to music that might inspire us to create our own music, so even AI shouldn’t have to pay for things it uses to train itself to be able to produce art or other data. Well, the counter to that is that even if we don’t pay for the music we stream, the music service that we’re using counts every stream and pays the artist for those streams. So the original owner is getting paid. With AI, we don’t know the method in which data is collected. Also, a lot of general licenses prohibit mass usage of data or commercial usage of data, so special attention needs to be paid to copyright and license rules, so that the correct people and artists get paid.

      • The same reasons apply to downloading music off the internet as well. Artists get paid when music is downloaded legally.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani suggested watching a TV series The Playlist, which explains all of this from each perspective (the artist, the law, the industry, the coders, etc.).

Attendees

  1. Bhavesh Kukreja

  2. Dheeraj Lalwani

  3. Harsh Kapadia

  4. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  5. Kedar Karbele

  6. Mohit Gangwani

  7. Poonam Jha

  8. Pranav Dani

  9. Pratik Thakare

  10. Ramyak Mehra

  11. Rishit Dagli

  12. Shubham Sah

  13. Swapnil Borkar

  14. Jaden Furtado

  15. Akhil Sahu

  16. Anil Harwani

  17. Hritik Sharma

  18. Kartik Patel

  19. Krishana Dave

  20. Ritesh Yadav

  21. Sarvesh Yogi

  22. Karthik Nair

  23. Tarun Chettiar

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OTC CatchUp #169

Date: 03-02-2024

Duration: 5 hrs 51 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

    • This was the winning project of TSEC Hacks 2024 that he helped build alongside his team members Jash Doshi, Stephen Vaz and Atharv Salin.

    • Technologies used: React.js, Express.js, MongoDB, Flutter and more

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OTC CatchUp #168

Date: 27-01-2024

Duration: 7 hrs 22 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #167

Date: 20-01-2024

Duration: 5 hrs 20 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General Introduction.

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

    • Dheeraj Lalwani suggested checking Uber’s Go Style Guide.

    • Anil Gohan talked about how one should try to employ second-order thinking to write and understand code since requirements for each use case can be different.

      • Keep your mind open since there isn’t a "one size fits all" solution in this case.

      • The best way to practice this is to read other people’s code and understand their thought processes.

      • He also shared a link to a blog post on Chesterton’s Fence which describes second-order thinking in depth.

    • Pranav Dani suggested that once the project starts growing and picking up pace, documentation is necessary to understand the functions of the code.

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

    • Anil Gohan suggested taking two or three layers of abstraction in a system or an application that you want to understand.

      • Try to trace how that system starts.

      • Try to trace all the services that the process forks into and understand how they interact with each other.

      • This gives us a high-level understanding of the architecture and how it works.

      • Eventually one can start to identify patterns in the system.

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

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OTC CatchUp #166

Date: 16-12-2023

Duration: 3 hr 30 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • Many companies are on a hiring freeze currently, although there some companies are opening up their hiring.

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

    • Travel time could be used to read books, listen to podcasts and make it a simple habit over a few weeks.

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

    • Some companies are laying off people who have just joined in due to a potential budget shortage.

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

    • Aditya Oberai strongly recommends reading fiction to develop a reading habit.

  • Book suggestions as discussed in the catchup:

    • Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne

    • Martian - Andy Weir

    • Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

    • 1984 - George Orwell

    • Ready player one - Ernest Cline

    • Foundation trilogy - Isaac Asimov

    • Journey to the center of the Earth - Jules Verne

    • Godfather - Mario Puzo

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

    • The idea is to learn from people better than you.

    • Aditya Oberai pointed out that part of attending meetups is to meet new people and get ideas and also support or redirect a few people towards something they might want.

      • In this case, experienced people might be ready to help out and act as a support but then they too need support when they need support which is difficult to find.

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

    • Aditya Oberai discussed GCP, firebase and costs of maintenance.

    • Services for Azure and AWS seem to be better than GCP.

  • Microsoft was worth more than Apple for a split second.

    • Aditya Oberai discussed how Microsoft has been doing well with enterprise services whereas Google does it better with consumer services.

    • Ramyak Mehra talked about how the newer generation might be more comfortable with using Chromebooks due to university requirements and overall less cost compared to Windows.

  • 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.

    • Aditya Oberai said that it’s more about what different cultures in different companies appreciate.

    • Ramyak Mehra suggested being upfront about the things you know and don’t know since it helps out.

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Chirag Nayyar

  3. Harsh Kapadia

  4. Kartik Soneji

  5. Mohit Gangwani

  6. Pranav Dani

  7. Ramyak Mehra

  8. Rishit Dagli

  9. Siddharth Kaduskar

  10. Wilfred Almeida

  11. Ronit Naik

  12. Amol Gawade

  13. Anil Gohan

  14. Bhavesh Kukreja

  15. Kartik Patel

  16. Khushal Ghathalia

  17. Nishith Savla

  18. Raghav Rathi

  19. Sarvesh Yogi

  20. Yo Yo

  21. Jaikishan Kamrani

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OTC CatchUp #165

Date: 06-01-2024

Duration: 4 hrs 15 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #164

Date: 30-12-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 50 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

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OTC CatchUp #163

Date: 23-12-2023

Duration: 5 hrs 16 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #162

Date: 16-12-2023

Duration: 4 hr 13 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • Darshan Rander suggested considering static site generation due to its cost-effectiveness and speed compared to WordPress, to which he responded that he finds WordPress easier to use and prefers it.

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

    • In this paper he talks about creating a diffusion model that can perform better in low light with RAW images as they have more data than processed images.

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

    • Rishit Dagli had observed that there was not any major impact in fields like research and related fields.

  • 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.

    • Kartik Soneji said that having a reference is better than just having theoretical knowledge.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #161

Date: 09-12-2023

Duration: 1 hr 40 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

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

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Chirag Nayyar

  3. Darshit Suratwala

  4. Dheeraj Lalwani

  5. Harsh Kapadia

  6. Ishan Sharma

  7. Mohit Gangwani

  8. Swapnil Borkar

  9. Wilfred Almeida

  10. Anil Harwani

  11. Atharva Yadav

  12. Bhavesh Kukreja

  13. Kartik Patel

  14. Om Pawaskar

  15. Raghav Rathi

  16. Sarvesh Yogi

  17. Soni Darshan

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OTC CatchUp #160

Date: 02-12-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 46 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • He said that he uses Fedora because it is more stable than Arch yet on cutting edge than Ubuntu.

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

    • Kartik Soneji said that we might not be able to find the exact location but we can find an approximate location by having a lookup table of IP address and ISPs in a region.

  • 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.

    • Darshan Rander explained that most colleges and students are interested in getting a job and being job-ready after college instead of being interested in CS theory hence University has these frameworks in their curriculum.

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OTC CatchUp #159

Date: 25-11-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 57 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Discussed

Attendees

  1. Darshan Rander

  2. Harsh Kapadia

  3. Himanshu Sharma

  4. Kartik Soneji

  5. Mohit Gangwani

  6. Rishit Dagli

  7. Sahil Prasad

  8. Saifuddin Saifee

  9. Siddharth Kaduskar

  10. Wilfred Almeida

  11. Jaden Furtado

  12. Bhavesh Kukreja

  13. Harsh Khatri

  14. Hiten Gerella

  15. Nisarg Thakkar

  16. Raghav Rathi

  17. Sanam Bhatia

  18. Sarvesh Yogi

  19. Shubham Yadav

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OTC CatchUp #158

Date: 18-11-2023

Duration: 2 hrs 35 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

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OTC CatchUp #157

Date: 11-11-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 21 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #156

Date: 04-11-2023

Duration: 2 hrs 43 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • His reason was because he didn’t want to move away from development and working as DevOps engineer at his workplace will do that.

  • 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.

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OTC CatchUp #155

Date: 28-10-2023

Duration: 2 hrs 38 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • Later on we talked about how it works and the data for NFT is stored on the IPFS servers and the hash on the chain.

    • We also talked about the rug pull scams in NFTs. We people crypto token is promoted on social media and when the price is driven up the scammer sells it.

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

    • Darshan Rander said that a lot of games were enjoyable because of the mods like mini-milita, GTA, etc

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

    • As a language they sure might have some bloat but they are battle tested and works really well.

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

Attendees

  1. Anas Khan

  2. Aniket Chavan

  3. Darshan Rander

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Jay Kaku

  6. Jia Harisinghani

  7. Kartik Soneji

  8. Krishna Gadia

  9. Mohit Gangwani

  10. Ninad Naik

  11. Pranav Dani

  12. Ramyak Mehra

  13. Rishit Dagli

  14. Sahil Prasad

  15. Swapnil Borkar

  16. Viranchee L

  17. Wilfred Almeida

  18. jaden furtado

  19. Aakanksha Joshi

  20. Akhil Sahu

  21. Anil Harwani

  22. Bhavesh Kukreja

  23. Ekta Madnani

  24. Eshaan Vaswani

  25. Gatha Vishesh

  26. Gunner Gunning

  27. Raghav Rathi

  28. Siddhant Shetty

  29. Srishti Singh

  30. atmaj koppikar

  31. jaikishan kamrani

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OTC CatchUp #154

Date: 21-10-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 5 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Darshan Rander

  2. Darshit Suratwala

  3. Jia Harisinghani

  4. Kartik Soneji

  5. Mohit Gangwani

  6. Ninad Naik

  7. jaden furtado

  8. Chirag Nayyar

  9. Anil Gohan

  10. Bhavesh Kukreja

  11. Hiten Gerella

  12. Hritik Sharma

  13. Krishana Dave

  14. Rushil

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OTC CatchUp #153

Date: 14-10-2023

Duration: 2 hrs 58 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Hardik Raheja

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Mohit Gangwani

  6. Rishit Dagli

  7. Saket Thota

  8. Siddharth Kaduskar

  9. Viranchee L

  10. Jaden Furtado

  11. Akhil Sahu

  12. Anil Harwani

  13. Bhavesh Kukreja

  14. Dhawal Abhonkar

  15. Eshaan Vaswani

  16. Jash Agrawal

  17. Krishana Dave

  18. Mahesh Patel

  19. Mohammad Ashfaq

  20. Pankaj Jaiswal

  21. Raghav Rathi

  22. Sanket Dalvi

  23. Satyam Patil

  24. Vedant Pal

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OTC CatchUp #152

Date: 7-10-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 15 mins

Topics Discussed

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

    • Dheeraj Lalwani shared how he is having exposure to new things like making documentation about the thing he is going to work on, getting them approved by his seniors and then starting working on the feature.

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

    • He said that by shutting down his PC, it goes into a login screen loop, which means that the system gets stuck on the login screen. The root cause of this issue is because of the Docker asking for a WSL kernel update.

      • He said that the kernel update was interrupted midway, which eventually led to the corruption of some registry keys, which he wasn’t able to fix.

    • Wilfred Almeida suggested Mohit Gangwani to make a bootable drive and fix it with recovery option.

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

    • Dheeraj Lalwani told how they create a new branch for every feature.

    • Continuing this, Mohit Gangwani asked if Fold is following any code conventions.

      • Dheeraj Lalwani shared how there are specific integrity checks that are done before pushing the code into production.

      • He gave a brief about the integrity checks like how PR reviews are detailed, and how PRs are verified by the CTO and a senior.

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

    • He said that, first, he is required to create a document on the thing he is going to work on.

      • The document has details like if he is trying to fetch an API, for what purpose the API is going to be used, what respective HTTP methods like GET, PUT, and POST are going to be used on it, whether the API will return a PAYLOAD or some other data.

    • After the details, he is required to write about the logic of the feature he is working on.

    • He said that most of the things that are not needed are filtered from the document itself while going under a PR review.

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

    • Dheeraj Lalwani shared how Quantiphi delayed his joining at work by 6 months.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani said that he had shared a tweet asking if there are any job openings for the role of backend developer for a friend, and somehow that tweet had reached the CTO of Fold.

      • He told the CTO of Fold that he will apply for the job. Unfortunately, he wasn’t shortlisted but he had e-mailed Fold about the take-home assignment that candidates get if they are shortlisted.

      • He said that he had 3 days for the completion of the take-home assignment, it took him 5 days to complete the assignment.

      • After submitting the assignment, he got called for an interview and then got an internship at the company.

  • 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.

    • Viranchee L shared that he completed two internships.

      • The first internship was at Qualcomm, where he was involved in implementing a security feature.

      • The second internship was at Passive Logic, where he was involved in implementing AutoDiff feature.

  • 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.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani shared that DevFolio was the first project of the company initially, Fold is the sister company which was formed later.

      • He shared that teams were separated for Fold, with the CTO, CEO and design head remaining the same as DevFolio.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani shared about the team size of Fold.

  • Ashfaq asked about how does Fold make money.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani shared that his company works on the freemium model.

      • He also shared that the DevFolio is free for students to host hackathons, but a flat fee worth of 25000 INR is charged for corporates to host internal hackathons.

Attendees

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OTC CatchUp #151

Date: 30-09-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 6 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #150

Date: 23-09-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 45 mins

Topics Discussed

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

  • Darshan Rander discussed about issues with Fold App.

    • He believes that there are a lot of white-spaces in the application which he didn’t like much.

  • 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.

    • We all were glad that a company finally listened to their user base.

    • We also talked about how Unity has lost the trust of their developer users because everyone will keep in the back of their minds how companies can very easily turn on their users. Some argued that this might not be the case as people might forget about it.

  • Anushka Bhagchandani shared her experience of working at Myntra.

    • She discussed Appliqué, which is an open-source design system for enterprise applications.

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

    • Anil Harwani talked about how a Keylogger works. It is basically installing a driver in the system so that it captures the strokes and sends them to a server or save them locally.

      • He talked about how Zero Click Malware and Rootkit work.

      • Continuing this, he told us about the widespread nature of an incredibly malicious worm called Stuxnet that was widespread and mostly affected Iran’s nuclear program.

      • He also talked about how Kernel Obejcts are needed to be signed.

        • He said that signing is important because no one other than an authorized user should be able to insert/install and use a kernel module/driver, as not following this could cause security issues.

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

    • Anil Harwani talked about IA64, an old ISA from Intel that was seen in their processor Itanium. It was supposed to be the alternative to amd64, but it never caught any traction.

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

    • link:https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking intel-and-amd-settle-agree-cross-licensing-deal/[Intel and AMD settle agree cross-licensing deal^]

    • AMD clarifies cross-license with Intel

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

    • He gave an example of how he wanted to know what is happening behind the scenes of a print() statement.

    • Anil Harwani gave him a brief about the different levels of abstraction that are developed on a computer system and how he can think of abstractions as a layer to make things easier to understand. To understand abstractions better, Anil gave examples of various abstractions by including real-life examples.

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

    • Anil Harwani talked about how hackathon promotes completing tasks instead of writing code with good practices. He also stated how there isn’t sufficient time for ideation.

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

    • Darshan Rander suggested distributing the project work amongst group members.

    • Anil Harwani talked about how the intent should be to help your teammates, not completely leave them. He acknowledged how there should be multiple plans for your project if anything at the last moment may fail.

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

Projects Showcased

Harsh Kapadia shared his project on capturing keystrokes using kernel.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #149

Date: 16-09-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 17 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General introductions.

  • We talked about how much someone should handhold a beginner.

    • Darshan Rander believes in helping others till he can.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani believes in giving them a direction and not hand-holding them.

      • He shared his story about how much he was able to learn while debugging the issue that he faced while installing C.

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

    • He shared his project JadenFurtado/LLaMaO which he gave talk on.

    • He said that he faced issues because attendees were lacking knowledge of maths required to understand LLMs.

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

    • Dheeraj Lalwani uses VSCode diff view and uses Git CLI for most of the things.

    • Darshan Rander prefers using VSCode’s integrated system of Git but he prefers gitui (CLI) as it has much better was to add hunks and navigation system.

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

    • The solutions were to scrape users' emails or ask them to set up an auto mail forwarder for Credit card transaction emails.

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

    • He got his interview because he followed up with the team.

Projects Showcased

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

    • The reason for this project was to make it easier to install C build tools and compiler for new users and help them for an easy onboard.

Attendees

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OTC CatchUp #148

Date: 09-09-2023

Duration: 2 hrs 36 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Abhigyan Bafna

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Darshit Suratwala

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Jainam Jagani

  6. Mohit Gangwani

  7. Siddharth Bhatia

  8. Wilfred Almeida

  9. Jaden Furtado

  10. Ashmit Rawat

  11. Bhavesh Kukreja

  12. Devesh Shelatkar

  13. Dipanshu Khandait

  14. Hritik Sharma

  15. Krish Bulchandani

  16. Mir

  17. Parth Gupta

  18. Prateek Pardeshi

  19. Saish

  20. Sarvesh Yogi

  21. Srishti Singh

  22. Vrinda Bundelkhandi

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OTC CatchUp #147

Date: 02-09-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 46 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

  • 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.

    • Technologies used: Jax, PyTorch, PEFT, Triton, Wasm

Attendees

  1. Abhigyan Bafna

  2. Ayush Chauhan

  3. Darshan Rander

  4. Darshit Suratwala

  5. Dheeraj Lalwani

  6. Harsh Kapadia

  7. Jainam Jagani

  8. Mohit Gangwani

  9. Rishit Dagli

  10. Sahil Prasad

  11. Wilfred Almeida

  12. Jaden Furtado

  13. Aashraay

  14. Aditya Dikonda

  15. Alok Prasad

  16. Arpit Kesari

  17. Bhavesh

  18. Dev Kithani

  19. Divyansh Singh

  20. Eshaan Vaswani

  21. Krishana Dave

  22. Krishna Mitra

  23. Laksh Doshi

  24. MdShafiq Shaikh

  25. Priyani Jain

  26. Sanjyot Mali

  27. Siddhant Pandey

  28. Sourav Kale

  29. Srishti Singh

  30. Tejashwini

  31. Viraj Bhambri

  32. Yanshuman Yadav

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OTC CatchUp #146

Date: 26-08-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 40 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Abhigyan Bafna

  2. Aditya Oberai

  3. Darshan Rander

  4. Darshit Suratwala

  5. Hardik Raheja

  6. Harsh Kapadia

  7. Himanshu Sharma

  8. Jainam Jagani

  9. Jay Kaku

  10. Jia Harisinghani

  11. Kartik Soneji

  12. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  13. Mohit Gangwani

  14. Prathamesh Karambelkar

  15. Rishit Dagli

  16. Siddharth Bhatia

  17. Siddharth Kaduskar

  18. Viranchee Ketan Lotia

  19. Wilfred Almeida

  20. Jaden Furtado

  21. Aashraay

  22. Aditya Dikonda

  23. Anil Harwani

  24. Arpit Kesari

  25. Atmaj Koppikar

  26. Ayaan Shaikh

  27. Bhavesh

  28. Chaitanya Jhade

  29. Chinmay Tullu

  30. Dishita Das

  31. Gaurang Pitale

  32. Jaikishan Kamrani

  33. Jash dharia

  34. Jivansh C

  35. Jyoti

  36. Krishana Dave

  37. Laksh Doshi

  38. Mihir Patil

  39. Parth Puranik

  40. Pratham

  41. Rahul G

  42. Richa Rawani

  43. Ronit Talreja

  44. Sanam Bhatia

  45. Sarvesh Yogi

  46. Srishti

  47. Trusha Madhav

  48. Vedang Kulkarni

  49. Yash Kadam

  50. Zidan Shaikh

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OTC CatchUp #145

Date: 19-08-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 30 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #144

Date: 12-08-2023

Duration: 6 hrs 10 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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:

    • OpenAI (chat gpt)

    • Google (bard)

    • Microsoft (bing)

    • Elon Musk’s X ai

  • 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.

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OTC CatchUp #143

Date: 05-08-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 22 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Darshan Rander

  2. Harsh Kapadia

  3. Ishan Sharma

  4. Kaushal Joshi

  5. Mohit Gangwani

  6. Nikshita Karkera

  7. Ramyak Mehra

  8. Tushar Nankani

  9. jaden furtado

  10. Anil Karaniya

  11. Anil Gohan

  12. Krishana Dave

  13. Priyanshu Gupta

  14. Somya Barwa

  15. Jay Aslaliya

  16. Prajwal Dhule

  17. Sampras Dsouza

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New CatchUp Attendee Meme

Darshan Rander created the following meme exposing Harsh Kapadia's habit of asking each new person attending OTC CatchUp sessions the question "Is this your first time here?"

Meme showing Harsh asking ever new CatchUp attendee 'Is this your first time here?'

OTC CatchUp #142

Date: 27-07-2023

Duration: 2 hrs 11 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

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OTC CatchUp #141

Date: 22-07-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 36 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #140

Date: 15-07-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 36 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

Attendees

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OTC CatchUp #139

Date: 08-07-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 51 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • Darshan Rander finds it inconvenient as he has format on save enabled as well, so the document is formatted as well with every autosave.

    • Also, autosave might be triggered when someone is in making changes to an implementation and everything could break because of features like hot-reload.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani prefers autosave as it saves the changes even if the system crashes.

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

    • The final solution he chose to go forward with was to create a new PR and cherry picking the changes from old PR.

  • 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.

    • Although this creates a security risk, however, the user has an option to disable it.

  • 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.

    • It is a cross-platform library that commands the GPU. It encapsulates common GPU functionality with a low-level cross-platform interface. IGL is designed to support multiple backends implemented on top of various graphics APIs (e.g. OpenGL, Metal and Vulkan) with a common interface.

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

    • Often it’s not well defined and sometimes it becomes difficult to keep up with the designs changes and implementation

    • It’s really difficult to implement such things as Flutter is very Material heavy.

  • 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.

Attendees

  1. Aryan Nayak

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Dheeraj Lalwani

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Jainam Jagani

  6. Krishna Gadia

  7. Ramyak Mehra

  8. Rishit Dagli

  9. Saifuddin Saifee

  10. Smit Jethva

  11. Swapnil Borkar

  12. Viranchi Lotia

  13. Wilfred Almeida

  14. Abhinav Srivastava

  15. Anil Gohan

  16. Arpan Garg

  17. Hamza Shaikh

  18. Harshit Malang

  19. Mohit Gangwani

  20. Pratik Thorat

  21. Simran Singh

  22. rushil shrivastava

  23. srikanth kosanam

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OTC CatchUp #138

Date: 01-07-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 56 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • A lot of products like Google Meet have warnings written in their console warning users not to run anything in the console they don’t understand.

  • 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.

    • A potential use case for saving JWTs in the database is to invalidate tokens before it expires.

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

    • Kartik Soneji was against it, as it exposes internal information and if not implemented properly, a user/an attacker can change parameters and can compromise the whole system.

  • 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.

    • It’s extra work and time for something only with a few hundred users.

    • Changing the UI might affect power users and disturb their workflow.

    • "Don’t change it if it’s working" mindset.

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OTC CatchUp #137

Date: 24-06-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 42 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Anush Veeranala

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Darshit Suratwala

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. jaden furtado

  6. Jay Kaku

  7. Kartik Soneji

  8. Mayank Ghogale

  9. Pranav Dani

  10. Pranil Chitre

  11. Rishit Dagli

  12. Saket Thota

  13. Viranchee L

  14. Viranchi Lotia

  15. Wilfred Almeida

  16. Gunner Gunning

  17. Hiten Gerella

  18. Krishana Dave

  19. Kulkarni Swamini

  20. Mohit Gangwaniwitter.com/mohit_explores[Mohit Gangwani^]

  21. Mr Raam

  22. Parith Garg

  23. Piush Paul

  24. Pranjal Ekhande

  25. Priyansh Salian

  26. Rithvik R

  27. Sanket Dalvi

  28. Shiva Charan

  29. Shiven Sharma

  30. Sri Harsha

  31. The Algorithmic

  32. Yash Ranawat

  33. Jay Aslaliya

  34. Sampras D’Souza

  35. Shiva Charan

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OTC CatchUp #136

Date: 17-06-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 37 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • Most laptops come with OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) keys tied to the motherboard of the laptop.

    • The discussions were about how Windows 8 was a visual overhaul over Windows 7, but many people were not in its favor due to its lack of similarity with the previous versions.

    • Some people think that Windows phones were ahead of their time.

  • 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.

    • Many people seem to be unhappy with this decision though.

    • Some helpful Reddit communities are private which otherwise would provide efficient and quick solutions to some problems.

      • Siddharth Bhatia and Anas Khan suggested using archived versions of the pages to get the required information.

      • Google Cache - Cached pages are an undeniably useful tool when you come across a web page that is performing poorly, or temporarily down for some reason.

  • Reddit threatening moderators to re-open their communities.

    • Many communities are private indefinitely.

  • 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.

    • The code that he writes, generates a circuit that is the logic of the code. He visualized the circuit using Vivado.

    • HDLBits has Verilog and VHDL as the most famous languages used to describe hardware.

    • SystemVerilog vs Verilog: page 2 of PDF

    • Nand2Tetris is a course that teaches you how to build a computer from first principles.

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

    • eVM - has a single core so it’s not very performant.

    • We then talked about eBPF. It is used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel at runtime without requiring changing kernel source code or load kernel modules.

    • Rishit Dagli suggested that Sysdig and Falco are now powered by eBPF.

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

    • It might not be immediate and it’s not just about attending talks and learning from that, but it is also about meeting people and learning from them. ROI might not be immediate in those cases.

    • Always checking for ROI is not the best. Some things that don’t scale well are okay to do at the start.

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OTC CatchUp #135

Date: 10-06-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 30 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General introductions.

  • Reddit's impact on ecosystem/community.

    • We discussed how Reddit’s recent actions have negatively affected a large ecosystem/community. We also talked about the biggest digital protest in it’s history.

    • Siddharth also mentioned that the removal of certain tools from moderators will likely lead to an increase in spam on Reddit.

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

    • Mohit Gangwani discussed how Apple’s VR technology is uncomfortable for continuous use beyond 30 minutes.

  • 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.

    • Jaden Furtado asked Rishit about math in engineering versus math in research, focusing on proofs in engineering and computations in research.

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

    • Rishit highlighted the autonomy given to professors, which varies from course to course.

  • 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.

    • Relevant materials and details about mentors and judges were shared, available in this Web Archive, since they removed the content on the website.

  • 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.

    • Centralized VCS is used a gaming standard for version control.

    • He discussed the utilization of CVCS, specifically for managing build files and fast files.

    • CVCS like Perforce provide efficient handling of these types of files and large asset files

    • He also discussed about the concept of Presubmit in Perforce.

    • The concept of presubmit is similar to pre-commit hooks.

    • Presubmit hooks allow for automated checks and validations before committing code changes.

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

Attendees

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OTC CatchUp #134

Date: 03-06-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 51 mins

Topics Discussed

  • 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.

    • JSConf India - Track 2

    • Ishan Sharma shared a talk by Ameer Jhan at JSConf in Bangalore. - Building scalable JS apps.

    • Getting accommodation in Bangalore is difficult, hence Jay and Ishan Sharma were discussing potential options.

    • We talked about navigating India and differences in the nomenclature of places across the world, where many places end up having similar names.

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

    • Server-based free tier options are not available and hence using serverless seems like the only viable option.

    • Netlify supports static sites, and Heroku has bad pricing after the salesforce acquisition.

    • Cloudflare workers is a good option.

  • 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.

Attendees

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OTC CatchUp #133

Date: 27-05-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 40 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

Attendees

  1. Abhigyan Bafna

  2. Aditya Oberai

  3. Aryan Nayak

  4. Darshan Rander

  5. Dheeraj Lalwani

  6. Harsh Kapadia

  7. Jay Kaku

  8. Pranav Dani

  9. Rishit Dagli

  10. Sahil Prasad

  11. Sarah Khan

  12. Sreekaran Srinath

  13. Wilfred Almeida

  14. Darshit Suratwala

  15. Dhrumil Thakore

  16. Fardeeen Samir D

  17. Harshvardhan Shukla

  18. Hrishikesh Dhuri

  19. Hritik Sharma

  20. Krish Manghani

  21. Lakshitaa Chellaramani

  22. Mitali Juvekar

  23. Mohit Gangwani

  24. Preksha Kothari

  25. Rahul Sanjay Agrawal

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OTC CatchUp #132

Date: 20-05-2023

Duration: 4 hrs

Topics Discussed

  • Saurabh Daware and Pranav Dani distilled different types of jobs available based on need and skills.

    • We discussed the specifics of different domains like cloud, frontend, and backend.

      • There’s no right time to make a switch in job roles.

      • Changing roles can help prevent mental stagnation.

    • Darshit Suratwala talked about how banks work on different projects.

  • Saurabh Daware shared how his team works with the frontend by creating and maintaining React libraries for the organization.

  • We discussed potential improvements and similar implementations for Vaulter — A WIP project by Dheeraj Lalwani and Chirag Lulla.

    • Darshit Suratwala said that in the case of GCP, the libraries support chunked uploads and the user can avoid the server and directly upload in the bucket.

    • They discussed the Samba server and FTP implementations.

    • Anil Harwani talked about how file chunks are processed and saved in a drive.

      • How does block storage ensure that you never lose data? Is it storing all the data in one single hard drive?

        • Many cases implement sequential file chunking and saving.

        • Either store the data in a single hard drive or save multiple copies of it across multiple hard drives.

        • If stored on a single drive, chances of failure are high, so instead of that store it in multiple 1 GB chunks and create a hash function for addressing.

        • Every 1 gig chunk can have a parity algorithm to check the consistency of the data.

        • Check parity between each chunk and store it across multiple drives.

      • The working is similar to RAID storage.

        • Each system has a fault tolerance limit for drive failure.

      • Metadata databases require high read speeds because a delay in response from the metadata database can lead to a ripple of delays in subsequent calls for file chunks/blocks from the block storage.

      • This leads to poor performance, eventually causing poor user experience.

        • Differences in latency in the hierarchy of storage from the CPU cache to the hard drive range from nanoseconds to milliseconds.

    • How will the self-hosting happen?

      • The idea is to create a simple executable for users to run on their server of choice.

        • Saurabh Daware suggested that he should first get the bare bones ready and then scale up from there.

        • By this time, work on optimizing the system and working on edge cases.

    • GCP Storage Browser and Filebox have similar implementations.

  • We discussed some struggles of students living abroad.

  • Dheeraj Lalwani shared some links about the community around languages:

  • Jay Kaku and Pranav Dani talked about system circuits and the evolution of binary.

  • Nothing has a collaboration with teenage engineering for their products.

  • Touch typing can be helpful for easily and optimally typing on keyboards.

    • Most people can learn touch typing within 1 month if they had some experience with using musical instruments since that involves using multiple fingers simultaneously.

  • Aditya Oberai and Darshit Suratwala talked about potential MITM (Man in the Middle) attacks using Wireshark.

    • Wireshark is a packet analyzer that can be used to analyze network traffic, but most of the times the data is encrypted and hence it cannot alter requests with positive outcomes.

    • ISPs use similar ways to analyze traffic.

Projects Showcased

  • Dheeraj Lalwani shared his progress on Vaulter, a self-hosted storage server.

    • It is a simple file-sharing and self-hosted storage server, inspired by an open-source web-based collection server and streamer, Navidrome that he had earlier worked with.

    • GitHub Repository

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OTC CatchUp #131

Date: 13-05-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 41 mins

Topics Discussed

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OTC CatchUp #130

Date: 06-05-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 30 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Dheeraj Lalwani

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Himanshu Sharma

  6. Jia Harisinghani

  7. Pranav Dani

  8. Rishit Dagli

  9. Siddharth Bhatia

  10. Siddharth Kaduskar

  11. Wilfred Almeida

  12. Jaden Furtado

  13. Anil Harwani

  14. Devarshi Shah

  15. Divyansh Singh

  16. Fardeeen Samir D

  17. Krrish Raval

  18. Vighnesh Hinge

  19. Yash Hingad

  20. Yash Raj

  21. Shreyans Suraliya

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OTC CatchUp #129

Date: 29-04-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 22 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Dheeraj Lalwani shared his recent internship experience where he has learned to be comfortable with not having answers to issues and people there to help him out.

    • It has been a good learning experience for him overall.

  • Sreekaran Srinath shared his fitness goals for running and lifting which he is currently working towards.

    • He aims to clear the US army fitness test by end of the year.

      • 2.4km under 13 minutes.

      • 5km in under 37 mins.

  • We talked about some internship opportunities and how one could upskill themselves to get ready for them.

  • Balancing competitive programming for critical thinking and working with projects on the weekdays to maintain familiarity with tools, seems to be a good enough approach.

  • Harsh Kapadia shared that he was going through the missing semester since he would require core knowledge while he will be interning at AMD for the summer with Anil Harwani.

    • Missing semester is a course by MIT that teaches you the basics of using a computer.

    • It talks about the history of compilers and dives deep into their functionalities, so it is a good resource for people interested in learning about it.

  • Ishan Sharma shared his skydiving experience.

  • Multiple conferences are cutting down on flying compensation and sending free tickets due to potential budgeting issues.

    • Companies with multiple divisions can afford the revenue crunch and still keep the flying compensation.

  • We talked about why the US economy and the job market took a hit.

    • Many reasons are dug up in the political history of the US and the decisions that it took in recent years.

      • Last few years when inflation wasn’t too high, banks were lending money at low-interest rates. This results in people taking loans and buying houses, cars, etc. Which in turn increases the demand for these products and hence the prices of these products go up. And guess what, ironically this is called inflation.

      • Tech-first companies made the mistake of predicting their user patterns and growth patterns to remain similar to the pandemic where most people were obliged to work from home in front of their computers.

        • This problem can be solved in two ways, either by increasing the revenue or by cutting down on expenses.

        • Microsoft Industrial Metaverse team was shut down because it wasn’t generating revenue and similarly many other companies had to cut down on such expenses since they were not generating revenue.

  • Aditya Oberai experimented with svelte and Azure Cognitive Services to create a project for generating alt texts for images.

    • Harsh Kapadia talked about different edge cases and some ways in which they could be resolved. For instance, by using the subset of the dataset only relevant to the use case for the alt text.

    • He was learning svelte, since appwrite uses it.

  • The acquisition deal between Microsoft and Activision fell apart due to concerns that it would alter the future of the fast-growing cloud gaming market, leading to reduced innovation and fewer choices for the UK gamers over the years to come.

    • Like cloud gaming, many companies are pushing their solutions on the cloud.

  • Harsh Kapadia and Aditya Oberai talked about the feasibility of building a product just for the sake of learning.

    • Companies in the current situation might not have the room to fund and experiment with new technologies.

    • When getting into companies and working for the market, one needs to think if the solution already exists or if could it be optimized.

  • Aditya Oberai talked about a company inferless providing serverless ML inferencing on GPUs and also has good backing. (GPU as a service.)

    • Like other serverless services that utilize CPU threads, this service utilizes plans using GPUs for running ML workloads.

    • Anil Harwani talked about what makes something serverless.

      • Compute can be made in a way where it’s scalable and you don’t care about where the compute happens as long as each compute is an atomic unit, which has no state whatsoever. Making every transaction as if it’s the only transaction, so there’s no state to be maintained.

      • Serverless compute services are relatively cheaper because the resources that are not running load all the time are repurposed for other workloads.

      • In the case of ML queries to be used in the serverless form, one needs to inject the model into the compute unit, which requires multiple GPUs to handle. This is when the latency is affected and the execution almost imitates a real server which is undesirable.

  • We talked about how we can maintain a balance between toxic productivity and rest.

    • We also discussed about mindfulness and meditation.

  • Aditya Oberai talked about his plans for ARCC newsletter.

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OTC CatchUp #128

Date: 22-04-2023

Duration: 6 hrs 15 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General introductions.

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about an issue that he encountered while building Homa Module in Ubuntu.

  • Wilfred Almeida showcased his Resume that he had self-hosted on a Debian-11 instance on a remote workstation on Hetzner for learning purposes.

    • He embedded the PDF in the HTML with tags, which results in a cleaner URL.

    • We discussed the "/" problem, where a URL might not be redirected to the correct location sometimes.

  • Tushar Nankani shared a Action Verbs List and a guide for writing Resume and cover letter that he found on the Harvard Business School website.

  • We had a short discussion about the skewed gender ratio in colleges and the tech industry which results in interesting observations such as:

    • The gender with lower representation is often given more opportunities (equity) to improve the gender ratio (equality).

    • The gender with lower representation might feel uncomfortable around the higher ones which could be an exaggerated spotlight effect.

  • Wilfred Almeida talked about getting ghosted by recruiters during applications for internships and full-time roles.

    • Anil Harwani talked about his internship experience during his bachelors degree and suggested Wilfred Almeida look for different domains and change up the job description by a bit.

      • When looking for a job, just keep the job description and technology aside and look for the right people and the culture.

      • You cannot control your starting position on the chess board, the only thing you can control is where you’re trying to get to.

        • Students passing from college are at the starting point on the chess board, whereas others have a lot to lose. Hence students can afford to lose and start again.

      • Finding an internship or a job on some level is making the right set of compromises that one is willing to live with.

      • A person’s value is generally measured in three dimensions:

        • Your skillset and abilities.

        • Your network.

        • Your risk-taking ability.

      • Foundational rule of saving money is to spend less than what you make or try to live as minimalistically as you can because there’s a lot of value in that.

      • There’s a job out there that someone’s not willing to do.

        • Cobol - People don’t want to touch mainframe programming because it is presumed to be difficult. Over time, this type of knowledge becomes invaluable because very less people are willing to work with it.

  • We discussed how some colleges or universities carry a certain prestige with them which gives an edge to the students during recruitment.

  • Siddharth Kaduskar asked why some people prefer finding friends or partners while solving CP (Competetive Programming) or for hackathons.

  • We talked about how one can find good partners for Hackathons.

  • We had a chat about credit cards (Credit Card Churning) and the perks that come with good credit scores and better cards.

  • Apple stores launched in India are well equipped for the experience but seems like the policies differ quite a bit from its stores in the US.

    • The function of these stores mostly seems to align with prestige and trust.

  • Aryan Nayak talked about his routine for solving Leetcode problems.

    • We talked about health, gym and fitness. This conversation culminated in a discussion about insulin resistance and how strenuous activities might eat up the insulin in the blood which also reduces the risk of diabetes.

    • He shared a book that he was currently reading: Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

  • Pranav Dani suggested a good podcast: 13 minutes to the moon.

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OTC CatchUp #127

Date: 15-04-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 43 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Rishit Dagli and Harsh Kapadia talked about Artificial Intelligence (AI).

  • Siddharth Kaduskar gave us an update on his project and told us how he has a clearer picture of what to do to build his OCR project after looking up multiple avenues.

  • Anil Harwani told us about some of the internals of Linux.

    • User space vs Kernel space

    • How does a Kernel figure out that a single core processor is in an infinite loop? There is an OS timer tick (APIC timer) that the processor uses to generate a regular interrupt and that is where it can be figured through usage monitoring that something is in an infinite loop.

    • What if there’s a bug in the Operating System’s Scheduler or if the hardware is hung? The machine has to be reset, but before a cold reset, a hardware interrupt called the Non-maskable interrupt (NMI) is initiated through the hardware’s control plane (that is usually not hung), that no software can trump. NMI is useful because it logs information before carrying out its resetting tasks, which aids in debugging the problem, which a cold reset would’ve made extremely difficult.

    • Gospels for Kernel level code

      • A while(1) loop without sleep() somewhere inside it is usually a very bad idea, as it can be a source of resource hogging and performance bottlenecks.

      • Polling for data should usually be between 15 to 20 ms and in rare cases, the fastest should usually be 1 ms.

    • Linux’s bind() that binds (assigns) a name (address) to a socket.

    • The nice command that runs a program with modified scheduling priority.

    • How does the Linux Out-of-Memory (OOM) Killer decide which process to kill first? (There is no right answer because there is a loss, but the OOM Killer has to be 'fair enough'.)

  • We talked about the Rust Foundation’s Trademark Policy Draft that has been causing uproar in the community.

    • We’re wondering whether it is okay to mention that programming language’s name in the point above after the stringent (and weird?) trademark policy draft.

    • Along similar lines, another restrictive licensing issue is the DeWitt Clause that came up with Oracle’s database. (Why’re we not surprised that it’s Oracle?)

  • Wilfred Almeida talked about how he was struggling to deploy his Rocket URL Shortener on Railway.

    • Rocket is a web framework for 'the programming language with a stringent trademark policy we mentioned above'.

  • Jaden Furtado gave a presentation on Mass Scanning Google Play-Store apps (On a Budget) that he gave at GDSC WOW Mumbai in April 2023.

Attendees

  1. Anas Khan

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Dheeraj Lalwani

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Jia Harisinghani

  6. Nikshitha Karkera

  7. Rishit Dagli

  8. Saket Thota

  9. Siddharth Kaduskar

  10. Wilfred Almeida

  11. Jaden Furtado

  12. Abhishek Vallecha

  13. Akhil Sahu

  14. Akshay Jagiasi

  15. Anil Harwani

  16. Atharva

  17. Kishan Wali

  18. Krishana Dave

  19. Prateek Khemchandani

  20. Ritojnan Mukherjee

  21. Umamaheswar Edara

Meet Screenshot

Meet #127 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #126

Date: 08-04-2023

Duration: 5 hrs 23 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General Introductions.

  • After Siddharth Kaduskar's project showcase, we gave feedback about how he could approach the project to make it more meaningful.

  • Anil Harwani suggested a different way to scan the timetable using computer graphics without using OCR or any other AI/ML library.

    • Assumptions include:

      • Single consistent font.

      • Consistent binary colors. (Black and white)

      • Time slots for rows and columns are fairly static.

      • Consistent format with double-sided arrows where the upper part is the subject and the bottom part is the teacher’s initials.

    • Using computer graphics, we can identify vectors and convert them into strings and then create a bitmap from the bottom section for analyzing subject initials.

      • These initials can be used as a mask while offsetting pixel values in each grid to identify the subject.

    • This approach can be used to identify the subject and teacher’s initials for each lecture thus creating a map for each subject.

    • Difference between bitmap and OCR boils down to the text format since OCR is generally trained to identify handwriting and various texts and since this was a simple text format, bitmap seems like a more efficient approach.

  • We talked about how the human optical system perceives and interprets vision.

    • Computer graphics is an ambitious field of development that aims at recreating the world digitally.

    • Humans are trying to reproduce a similar process while capturing images from the cameras.

      • The pixel count in the phones is not the major issue but the pipeline or the processing of how the image is perceived and interpreted.

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about bitwise operations and how shifting works.

    • He said that after searching, he found that the operations depend on the implementation based on if the number is signed or unsigned.

  • Siddharth Kaduskar and Siddharth Bhatia talked about different OCR libraries like Nanonets OCR and ABBYY OCR.

  • We talked about the process of making an Indian savory made with a crispy shell filled with spiced potatoes, chickpeas, onions, and tamarind chutney, and dunked into a tangy and spicy mint water.

    • The water used in the savory can be sourced from dubious locations. Imagine the sweat, grime, and germs that could be present on their hands. Not to mention, the ingredients themselves might not always be stored or handled properly, leading to contamination and foodborne illnesses.

    • However, don’t let these potential hygiene issues scare you away from enjoying this delicious treat!

    • This technical discussion was aimed at analyzing and evaluating the food safety and hygiene practices among pani puri vendors.

  • Darshan Rander and Pranav Dani talked about shifting from Spotify to Youtube Music after the license dispute between Spotify and Zee music.

  • While we were discussing Schrodinger’s cat, the discussion LEAD (poison) to how levels of radiation might be higher at altitudes at which planes fly.

  • Sreekaran Srinath and Pranav Dani talked about fitness and workout, where Sreekaran Srinath shared how his Apple Watch helps him track all the data using Apple Fit.

Projects Showcased

  • Siddharth Kaduskar showcased Bunker, an attendance tracker using OCR to scan timetables.

  • Jainam showcased his portfolio website that he is currently working on.

Meet Screenshot

Meet #126 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #125

Date: 01-04-2023

Duration: 04 hrs 23 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

  • Kalpesh Jangir showcased Attendance Assist, an app allowing users to mark their attendance with a to-do list feature for assignments.

  • Jia Harisinghani showcased a HTML web site where she is trying to learn the basics of Web Development.

  • Jaden Furtado showcased his final year project which is a tool that checks for security vulnerabilities in code.

    • He built it in a way such that someone can deploy it to their CI/CD pipeline and get a vulnerability report.

Meet Screenshot

Meet #125 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #124

Date: 25-03-2023

Duration: 03 hrs 10 mins

Topics Discussed

  • We conducted our third installment of OTC talks - OTC Talks #3 - Routing Using IP and MAC Addresses - with Harsh Kapadia as our speaker.

  • Rishit Dagli, Pranav Dani and Harsh Kapadia talked about ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the future of AI.

  • We discussed how tools like ChatGPT and BARD might have the potential to eliminate the need for people to study subjects or topics in depth.

    • Rishit Dagli discussed one of his professor’s perspectives who has worked on GPT and suggested that if something is answerable by ChatGPT or any other AI models, then it’s not a skill worth developing or spending a lot of time on.

    • Harsh Kapadia and Pranav Dani talked about how people might lose on the thinking part of the learning process which one goes through when they write, question and think about the topics objectively.

      • To refine something and add subtle nuances, one needs to think and write slowly for the realizations to hit since eureka moments are rare.

    • Kartik Soneji compared AI and calculators in terms of how either took over jobs.

      • Since calculators executed instructions on predefined rules, the chances of failure were negligible. This led to people losing their jobs as human calculators overnight.

      • Outcomes of tasks handed to AI in current scenarios are subjective since the right answer is not clear.

  • Kartik Soneji discussed why laws aren’t written in first-order logic, since people can have multiple interpretations of what the current laws mean, hence having a single interpretation of the law will lead to less confusion.

  • We talked about quantum computers and how they might pose a threat to current forms of encryption systems since they can break the ciphers in a very short time.

Attendees

  1. Abhigyan Bafna

  2. Anas Khan

  3. Ayush Bhosle

  4. Dheeraj Lalwani

  5. Hardik Raheja

  6. Harsh Kapadia

  7. Jia Harisinghani

  8. Jaden Furtado

  9. Kartik Soneji

  10. Mohit Shetty

  11. Ninad Naik

  12. Pranav Dani

  13. Pratik Thakare

  14. Preet Parekh

  15. Ramyak Mehra

  16. Rishit Dagli

  17. Sahil Prasad

  18. Saifuddin Saifee

  19. Sainath Poojary

  20. Sarah Khan

  21. Siddharth Bhatia

  22. Sreekaran Srinath

  23. Tushar Nankani

  24. Wilfred Almeida

  25. Madhav Vishwakarma

  26. Ajay Maurya

  27. Altaf Alam

  28. Aman Manapure

  29. Anil Harwani

  30. Arush

  31. Atharva Jadhav

  32. Bhupesh Varshney

  33. Darshit Suratwala

  34. Dhruvit Diyora

  35. Harshal Shekdar

  36. Hiten Gerella

  37. Hrishikesh Dhuri

  38. Jarrett Fok

  39. Jeevika

  40. Krishana Dave

  41. Laksh Doshi

  42. Mohd Abuzaid Ansari

  43. Naveen Pandey

  44. Raghav Rathi

  45. Tanmay Sankpal

  46. Varshith Kumar

  47. Vivek Namaye

  48. curious wiki

Meet Screenshot

Meet #124 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #123

Date: 18-03-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 10 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Dheeraj Lalwani asked everyone for weighing in on his Startup VS MNC decision.

    • He said he considered factors like mentorship, code reviews, having an actual team to work with and pay into consideration when making the decision.

    • It was also agreed upon by everyone that going from an MNC to a StartUp is easier compared to going from a StartUp to an MNC.

    • Wilfred Almeida said that he hasn’t figured what tech/domain he wants to work full time on, so he prefers a startup because it’s relatively easy to jump work. Now people who’ve taken a gist of my skills recommend him to work at an MNC because they’ll groom him and he can polish his skill set.

    • Darshit Suratwala suggested that when it comes to learning, there are better opportunities in a StartUp but he agreed to the concerns raised by Dheeraj Lalwani and we came to a decision to choose MNC over a StartUp.

  • Darshit Suratwala told everyone about Visual ChatGPT.

  • Dheeraj Lalwani shared how he tried generating some beautiful imaginary art images with Midjourney bot on Discord.

  • Wilfred Almeida shared Dalai which helps Run LLaMA and Alpaca on your computer.

  • We talked about ControlNet and Stable Diffusion

  • Ishan Sharma showcased his new portfolio which contains 3D elements which he designed on Spline

  • Dheeraj Lalwani shared a few essays by Paul Graham

  • Jaden Furtado asked an question: Say someone comes up with an idea. And they discuss it with a couple of friends and the friends start working on the idea and the person who came up with the idea stays in the feedback loop and keeps giving their input. Who would own the product/idea?

    • Many people weighed in with their opinions.

    • Someone suggested the idea belongs to the person who patented it first.

    • Eventually we concluded with a shared ownership between the partnersich needs the ratio on whto be discussed contextually.

  • Darshan Rander shared with everyone that he started interning as a Full Stack App Developer at Stratzy.

  • Jay Kaku talked about his project where he is talked about pipelining at hardware level and uses Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for better throughput.

  • Darshit Suratwala talked scale3labs which is a tool for montinoring blockchain nodes and networks.

  • We talked about milliCPU a unit for measure CPU resource ie. 1000 milliCPU = 1 core.

  • Jay Kaku shared that he is interested in apply at beagleboard.org for this year’s GSoC.

    • Beagleboard is similar to Raspberry Pi but it is more focused on optimizing machine learning processes on smaller hardware.

Projects Showcased

Meet Screenshot

Meet #123 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #122

Date: 11-03-2023

Duration: 2 hrs 30 mins

Topics Discussed

Meet Screenshot

Meet #122 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #121

Date: 04-03-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 4 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Rishabh Bansal talked about his plans on conducting a meetup on cloud native and no code.

    • He is currently working at Oracle and had a long discussion on the SAN (Storage Area Network).

    • He talked about Dell EMC which can handle storage allocation automatically for VMs.

  • Rishit Dagli shared his CS Theory Notes

  • Rishit Dagli shared about his aspiration to publish a paper on the ICLR

  • Darshan Rander talked about his final year engineering project BackGen, which helps in creating a foundational backend code for API routes using OpenAPI specifications in GoLang. This project assumes the user to be proficient with GoLang, since frontend and database is supposed to be handled by them.

    • Anil Harwani gave a situation — "If your company asked you to build such a system, what tech stack would you use?"

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about Homa, a replacement for TCP on the server side to solve problems faced due to TCP.

  • Darshan Rander shared that he is trying to learn Helix, which is a terminal editor similar to vim.

    • He also shared a CLI named slides which helps the user to make presentation slides using markdown files and present them on the terminal.

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about what is ARP, how unsecure it is and why isn’t it being fixed.

    • Ramyak Mehra mentioned that most of the sites are using TLS, and ARP poisoning is not possible in sites where you have a TLS connection.

  • Rishit Dagli shared a few projects which can be used to benchmark ML models.

  • Ramyak Mehra shared how he has implemented adding metadata in a live stream video.

  • Ramyak Mehra and Darshan Rander talked about the state of Flutter.

    • Flutter team has decided not to make it indexable and going to make it a framework where faster interactions and performance are needed.

      • Addition of a garbage collector in WASM would make it a better option as currently more than 3MB WASM file is downloaded to run Flutter Web.

    • Flutter Team started working on Impeller (A custom-made graphical engine for Flutter) which is meant to replace skia.

  • Ramyak Mehra shared about his 2 job options one of which seems more comfortable to him, to which Anil Harwani asked him to not consider comfort as a variable at this age as this is the age where he should struggle.

  • Rishit Dagli asked Anil Harwani how he assigns weights to things while making a decision.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #120

Date: 25-02-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 12 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Upgrading SSDs does not necessarily mean better performance since it is dependent on various factors such as processor and motherboard support.

    • Jia Harisinghani recently upgraded her SSD and the result was not much noticeable.

      • Pranav Dani suggested she use a Linux distro since it uses fewer resources generally.

  • Rishit Dagli talked about his recent meeting with Steve Wozniak.

  • We discussed the application of 3D transforms in computer graphics after Rishit Dagli showcased his project.

  • Tushar Nankanitalked about the previous instances where we discussed stable diffusion and how it works.

    • Stable Diffusion Web is one such example that uses a latent text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input.

  • Rishit Dagli shared Call For Tiny Papers for ICLR 2023.

    • The deadline is 15th March 2023.

    • The Call For Tiny Papers is a good way to get started with research.

  • We discussed two methods in JS - Slice and Splice - for creating a temporary copy of an array.

    • This discussion was engendered after Tushar Nankanishowcased jsonxp since we were discussing some ways in which the arrays could be handled.

  • Google has shut down multiple prestigious coding competitions.

  • We discussed some ways in which CatchUp Summaries could be automated.

  • We talked about companies like Amazon coming to college with roles providing lower packages.

    • While these companies are facing overhiring issues, colleges use the company names in their favor.

  • Ashwin Kumar Uppalashared that GitHub Campus Expert had some internal security issues recently due to which one of the contractors had complete access to Campus Expert’s portals.

    • This led to the removal of most members from the portal, but this issue was soon fixed.

    • He also said that he was not able to access raw.githubusercontent.com on Jio network.

  • Ashwin Kumar Uppalashared that his browser (Safari) was consuming a lot of resources for the meet.

    • Browsers might be using more resources due to more available resources.

      • Pranav Dani talked about Parkinson’s law for people to relate with the computer resource issue where the device might use more memory only because it has the luxury to access it.

  • Ashwin Kumar Uppalatalked about how it is difficult to find good first issues on GitHub since Twitter bots swoop them and it becomes difficult to find and contribute.

  • While on the topic of companies like Google shutting down multiple coding competitions, Anil Harwani tried to explain how companies are trying to effectively increase income by reducing expenses that don’t generate income (or potential income).

    • Based on the math of inflation, one has to earn 10% more every year to maintain the same standard of living (Assuming that the rate of inflation is 10%).

      • This issue can be tackled either by increasing income or decreasing expenses.

    • Periods of austerity are good for innovation.

  • Anil Harwani described how a computer works based on the Von Neumann architecture to later discuss the differences between CPU and GPU.

    • A modern CPU can have multiple cores which are good at performing general-purpose tasks, but a CPU is not good at performing extremely parallel operations.

      • Some CPUs might have accelerators for performing parallel operations on an order of magnitude of maybe 100s of threads, but they are not as good as GPUs.

    • Every processor has I/O buses (could be PCIe (X4) links) that talks with NVMe(Non-Volatile Memory Express, a storage protocol running on top of PCIe) and a GPU can have a PCIe (x16) link, which translates into 4 times more bandwidth than the storage.

      • When a GPU is triggered, the OS triggers DMA (Direct Memory Access) which is a hardware mechanism that allows bypassing CPU so that the GPU can directly talk with the memory.

        • We used GPUz to determine our GPU specifications. Interesting fact - This tool was built by a single person.

  • We discussed the differences between PCIe versions and the link transfer speeds that come with them.

    • Speed differences are huge if we compare PC GPUs and commercial GPUs like NVIDIA A100.

      • This is a whitepaper that talks about the architecture of the A100 GPU.

  • Anil Harwani talked about the function of the voltage regulators on the GPU.

    • Those little devices can suck power that is equivalent to or even more than a small refrigerator or an AC.

      • Images are available in this whitepaper.

  • We zoomed into GPU cores where we talked about shader modules which can essentially do fast math operations.

    • Memory Controllers and L2 Cache help in loading the code in GPU which is then executed through the shader modules.

    • All the shader cores are clubbed into units called Warps.

      • Each warp can execute 32 threads.

        • Each thread can be a different instance of the same program.

  • Anil Harwani shared that he designed Nvidia’s DGX 100 which uses NVLink to connect 1120 GPUs which act as a single system.

    • This system has a very high bandwidth, memory and lots of tensor cores.

    • These types of systems are used to train things like ChatGPT.

    • He also shared Rack Units and how they are used to allocate systems in a server.

    • We discussed what a DIMM is.

  • We learned why mainframes are still used for handling transactions.

  • Singapore does not follow its geographical time zone mostly because of financial reasons.

    • It tries to match the time with Japan which has adverse effects on the circadian rhythm of the people.

  • Anil Harwani suggested a podcast by BBC World Service - 13 minutes to the Moon

Projects Showcased

  • Rishit Dagli showcased 3D Transforms - a library to easily work with 3D data and make 3D transformations.

  • Tushar Nankanishowcased jsonexp a JS script for linking Twitter attendees using the attendance list generated by the chrome extension.

    • It uses an attendee list to generate a map of attendees for attendees.adoc.

    • GitHub Repository

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #119

Date: 18-02-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 30 mins

Topics Discussed

Meet Screenshot

Meet #119 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #118

Date: 11-02-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 36 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General introductions

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about BGP and BGP security (RPKI and BGPSec).

  • Dheeraj Lalwani asked whether he should continue with his internship or not.

  • Anil Harwani suggested planning our weeks and months.

    • He talked about how most of us grossly misunderstand our capabilities of getting things done. We usually schedule more than we can do and we can increase that limit only by planning, hitting our limits, and steadily, slowly and consistently working on increasing them.

    • He also recommended reading the book The Mythical Man-Month.

    • Harsh Kapadia supported the argument by talking about how planning has improved his life. Harsh said that he is more aware of his limits and shortcomings and it helps him try to improve a little everyday.

  • Anil Harwani asked people to learn about Floating Point Arithmetic in computers to explain Why does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?

  • A few simple portfolios that are soothing to look at.

  • Harsh Kapadia ranted about how complicated and overwhelming the Front End Web Development space has become, where most of the things are not needed by a majority of projects, yet Twitter and other places only talk about those things and create a hype around them, with opinionated fights blooming out of nowhere. Obviously innovation is good and necessary, but still things just seem too overwhelming and everything seems to circle back to the same standard and basic concepts with time.

  • Jay Kaku talked about how learning about the architecture of something is like learning from a story of learnings and decisions.

  • Harsh Kapadia responded to Siddharth Bhatia on how not everyone has a natural talent or knack of doing or understanding certain things and that that could be dealt with by learning through a lot of varied experiences.

  • Annsh Agrawaal, Vatsal Patel and Anil Harwani talked about the Leetcode grind.

  • Jay Kaku recommended reading Mindset.

  • Anil Harwani told us to strongly question our biases, be aware of them (especially while taking decisions) and understand where they came from, otherwise it might lead to unforeseen outcomes.

  • With time, Anil Harwani has discovered that thinking is expensive and doing is cheap. He strongly recommends that we spend more time thinking, taking a step back and looking at the problem, and asking the correct questions rather than immediately starting to solve a problem.

  • Rishit Dagli talked about how he doesn’t think that ChatGPT isn’t very revolutionary and is more of a well-executed Engineering feat than a research feat.

    • We were surprised to learn that opinion, but Anil Harwani told us that people who work in a particular field or on a particular product know more about it and have the knowledge to understand things deeper than the user archetype.

    • Rishit added that most of AI/ML stuff is some variant of Backpropagation that is telling one how to do Curve Fitting, because humans don’t do the math behind Curve Fitting and gradients very well.

  • Vatsal Patel talked about how reaching out to people in his company to learn more and talk about various things that were at times not that related to his job role has helped him grow, learn more and network.

  • Vatsal Patel shared his job responsibilities working on the automation side of things in Game Development, where he has been unifying Continuous Integration workflows and has been getting used to a Version Control System called Perforce Helix Core.

  • Anil Harwani shared Children of the Magenta Line and told us that a lot of the principles in the video apply to life in general.

Attendees

  1. Ayush Bhosle

  2. Annsh Agrawaal

  3. Dheeraj Lalwani

  4. Hardik Raheja

  5. Harsh Kapadia

  6. Jay Kaku

  7. Krishna Gadia

  8. Pooja Gera

  9. Pratik Thakare

  10. Rishit Dagli

  11. Saifuddin Saifee

  12. Siddharth Bhatia

  13. Siddharth Kaduskar

  14. Vatsal Patel

  15. Wilfred Almeida

  16. Jaden Furtado

  17. Deeksha Sharma

  18. Aanya Singh Dhaka

  19. Aditi Katehra

  20. Aishwarya Chandra

  21. Anamika Pandey

  22. Anil Harwani

  23. Ankita Prajapati

  24. Ankur Ankit

  25. Anshu Kadyan

  26. Anushka Shankar

  27. Apoorva Gilhotra

  28. Arushi

  29. Azmeen khatoon

  30. Charvi Gupta

  31. Gauri Maheshwari

  32. Jia Harisinghani

  33. Krishana Dave

  34. Prachi Yadav

  35. Queen Devashi

  36. Raghav Rathi

  37. Sneha Singh

  38. Vaishali Kataria

  39. Vashitva Bagga

  40. Muskan Kumari

  41. Sunishka

  42. Vidushi

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #117

Date: 04-02-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 47 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Dheeraj Lalwani asked everyone if he should continue his internship or drop it off of preparing for off-campus placements and to focus on fitness.

    • Everyone suggested he continue his internship till he finds something better.

    • Dhiraj Chauhan suggested that once he joins the gym, he makes friends with someone over there as an accountability partner.

  • Raghav Rathi shared Gita GPT with everyone.

  • Dheeraj Lalwani talked about Dynamic Programming.

  • We talked about the tradeoffs between quality of life in India vs Abroad.

  • Jia asked how can we as Indians improve so as to keep people from moving out in search of better opportunities.

  • Jaden Furtado told everyone that surrounding yourself with good influences is super important, especially early on in college.

  • Sarah Khan shared her experience of participating in the recent hackathon - TSEC Hacks 2023 by TSEC CodeCell

  • Sarah Khan shared her new project idea - Meet-Summarizer and asked everyone for suggestions and advice on how to implement it.

  • Ashwin asked advice on how to scale communities.

  • Sarah Khan discussed her semester 4 subjects and her ambitions for the future.

  • We discussed about COVID and how it has affected many aspects of people’s lives, careers and lifestyles.

  • Saifuddin Saifee shared how he was exploring 3D Printing during COVID using Autocad Fusion 360

  • Kaustubh Khavnekar spoke about winters in Canada and Surviving in -19°C.

  • Saifuddin Saifee talked about his SIH project asked a few questions on Game Development because he has been reached out by the Government of India to continue the SIH project.

Projects Showcased

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #116

Date: 28-01-2023

Duration: 5 hrs 12 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

Attendees

  1. Darshan Rander

  2. Dheeraj Lalwani

  3. Dhiraj Chauhan

  4. Harsh Kapadia

  5. Jainam Jagani

  6. Jay Kaku

  7. Kartik Soneji

  8. Krishna Gadia

  9. Pranav Dani

  10. Rishit Dagli

  11. Saifuddin Saifee

  12. Siddharth Bhatia

  13. Siddharth Kaduskar

  14. Smit Jethva

  15. Tushar Nankani

  16. Vatsal Patel

  17. Wilfred Almeida

  18. Jaden Furtado

  19. Anil Harwani

  20. Atharva

  21. Burhanuddin Udaipurwala

  22. Jia Harisinghani

  23. Manas Thadhani

  24. Omkar Raval

  25. Piyush Makhija

  26. Prateek Pardeshi

  27. Raghav Rathi

  28. Suraj Kumar

  29. Vighnesh Hinge

  30. Zoya varma

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #115

Date: 21-01-2023

Duration: 2 hrs 53 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General introductions.

  • Pranav Dani and Dheeraj Lalwani discussed about MWC meetup in Churchgate, held on that day.

    • Overall, it was a good meetup. While most of the talks were aimed at "beginners", Faiz Malkani's talk was more inclusive and talked about how one can find their foot in a world that seems enormous.

  • We discussed how GPUs are not always faster than CPUs in every scenario.

    • CPUs have a lower latency due to faster access to the cache memory.

    • GPUs have a higher bandwidth.

    • Harsh shared a video regarding the same: Are GPUs Faster than CPUs?

  • We talked about (FLOPS) Floating Point Operations Per Second, and how it affects the performance of a CPU.

    • It is a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers.

  • Jaden Furtado explained how an SQL injection works and also how ScanRE, the project he showcased, uses Regex to find vulnerabilities in the GitHub repositories.

    • PhP implements sanitization in the form of a function called mysqli_escape_string() which was updated to mysqli_real_escape_string(), which could be used to mitigate SQL injection, although both versions have vulnerabilities.

      • Since these functions add a \ before the special characters in the code (for instance: 'SELECT * from TABLE where id='.$var, where var is a set of special characters), it is possible to bypass the sanitization by using \\ instead of \ which is one of the major vulnerabilities.

  • Jaden Furtado talked about how ScanRE is split into four stages: Fetch, ScanCode, StoreResults and Delete.

    • None of these parts are dependent on each other and can be run independently.

    • Since they are independent, he is using Celery to queue and run the tasks asynchronously.

      • Anil Harwani suggested that this is essentially an out-of-order pipelining engine that is trying to get done as much work as it can with as much latency it can tolerate.

    • Anil Harwani talked about how Celery would act as point of vulnerability since now it is dependent on the developers maintaining Celery to not mess up the codebase.

    • Jaden Furtado suggested that he is essentially scanning the entirety of GitHub to find vulnerabilities in the codebase.

      • Anil Harwani suggested that this would require differential scanning since the repositories are constantly changing.

  • Jay Kaku shared that his final year project is about making a coprocessor on a FPGA.

    • Jaden Furtado asked multiple questions about the feasibility of the project and cooperation from the professors.

  • We discussed the common issues while switching from android to iOS, out of which WhatsApp migration is the most irritating for most users.

    • While there are ways to handle the situation, it isn’t user-friendly, which is how Apple locks users into its ecosystem of products and services.

Projects Showcased

  • Wilfred showcased his Portfolio Website.

    • His portfolio is a fork of Brittany Chiang's portfolio website which is also used by many people.

  • Jaden Furtado shared his updates on ScanRE - A tool for scanning and finding vulnerabilities in GitHub repositories using static code analysis.

    • The tool checks for vulnerabilities in the code by using regex.

    • He created a UI for the tool.

    • GitHub repository

Attendees

  1. Ayush Bhosle

  2. Ayush Chauhan

  3. Chiranjeev Srivastava

  4. Darshan Rander

  5. Dheeraj Lalwani

  6. Harsh Kapadia

  7. Jaden Furtado

  8. Jainam Jagani

  9. Jatin Chaudhary

  10. Jay Kaku

  11. Krishna Gadia

  12. Nikshita Karkera

  13. Ninad Naik

  14. Pranav Dani

  15. Pratham Rohra

  16. Pratik Thakare

  17. Smit Jethva

  18. Viranchee Lotia

  19. Wilfred Almeida

  20. Sarah Khan

  21. Siddharth Bhatia

  22. Tushar Nankani

  23. Ananya Verma

  24. Anil Harwani

  25. Ayush Bhosle

  26. Ayush Chauhan

  27. Jia Harisinghani

  28. Krishna Dave

  29. Navya Agarwal

  30. Prateek Pardeshi

  31. Ritojnan Mukherjee

  32. Saarthak Kumar

  33. Yash Wavdankar

  34. Altaf Alam

  35. Atharva Honrao

  36. atharva yadav

  37. Bhavesh Garud

  38. Cloud Core

  39. Dg Star

  40. Divyansh Singh

  41. Gaurav Ghade

  42. Harsh Sharma

  43. Harshal Shekdar

  44. Hiten Dusseja

  45. Manas Thadhani

  46. Manish Dusa

  47. Naveen Pandey

  48. Prasad Satpute

  49. Raj Yadav

  50. Ruturaj Chandgude

  51. Sakshi Bhandari

  52. Sarvesh Parab

  53. shruti singh

  54. Shrutik Gupta

  55. Tushar Shelke

  56. Vaishnavi More

  57. Vidhi Vaishnav

  58. Vighnesh Hinge

  59. Vrajesh H

  60. who else but Tullu

  61. Yo Yo

Meet Screenshot

Meet #115 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #114

Date: 14-01-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 32 mins

Topics Discussed

  • We discussed how ChatGPT is gaining popularity.

    • Microsoft has acquired the majority stake in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

      • This could also imply that Microsoft services such as the Bing Search Engine might use ChatGPT to provide better search results.

    • Siddharth Bhatia shared a VS Code extension for ChatGPT.

  • Nikshita Karkera shared a video about how Artificial Intelligence follows a set of rules to generate responses and why it isn’t sentient at this point.

  • After Anas Khan's CodeClip project showcase, Anil Harwani talked about how everyone trying to build something should understand how things work.

    • The reason is that whenever something goes wrong in a tool, you should be able to understand the problem and debug it, or even better contribute to its functionality.

    • Once the size of the code base starts increasing, it becomes difficult to handle the code, so he suggested going through a lot of code and understanding it.

  • Saifuddin Saifee and Anas Khan talked about how they feel comfortable using a certain library and the reason for working on a project with the same.

    • Anil Harwani added that a tool should be used when it solves the complete purpose and provides the necessary fallback actions.

  • We talked about databases and the use cases for SQL and NoSQL.

    • NoSQL databases are fast and scalable for average use cases.

    • Relational databases are applicable to most use cases, but they have a lot of overhead on the data modeling (schematic) side. Maintaining these databases is a hassle as well, due to numerous rigid constraints in place for integrity and other properties.

      • For instance, updates and inserts in Relational Databases can be very expensive from time to time.

    • We talked about how SQLite might be one of the biggest database engines, and is known to be notoriously stable and simple to use. The documentation is simple and easy to understand as well.

  • The SQLite web site server is a single-person endeavor, and the server is written in C and is self-hosted.

  • We talked about certain use cases for Wilfred Almeida's MobXcess project that he showcased.

    • Harsh Kapadia discussed how the application could be improved by addressing a reliability issue for OAuth where someone could DDoS the application in its current state.

  • We discussed how SSH (Secure Shell) came into the existence.

    • A precursor to SSH was the Telnet, which enables connection with a remote server but it does so in plain text, which can be intercepted and used by anyone.

    • SSH was defined for maintenance tasks where the term 'maintenance' never had a boundary.

    • Since SSH is open source, it is as secure for any user as it is for any company using it.

  • Anil Harwani suggested reading Site Reliability Engineering reference books for understanding the points to keep in mind while building a secure application.

  • Pranav Dani talked about the Alumni meet at his college where he and Anil Harwani talked about how to approach reading reference books.

    • The difference between reading and comprehension makes all the difference in whether one has understood a concept.

  • Sreekaran Srinath, Pranav Dani and Aditya Oberai talked about Forex transaction rates and which banks provide good deals.

    • We discussed the most annoying things about Forex transactions which pertain to not receiving an OTP for any transaction on the card.

    • Apparently Apple Card is causing losses, since it is an average card with not a lot of benefits.

    • People don’t handle Credit Cards properly and hence banks end up making more money.

    • Sreekaran Srinath talked about Credit Card churning to get the most benefits out of a card.

Projects Showcased

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Anam Ansari

  3. Anas Khan

  4. Dheeraj Lalwani

  5. Harsh Kapadia

  6. Himanshu Sharma

  7. Ishan Sharma

  8. Jay Kaku

  9. Kaavya Saxena

  10. Kaushal Joshi

  11. Krishna Gadia

  12. Nikshita Karkera

  13. Pooja Gera

  14. Pranav Dani

  15. Pratik Thakare

  16. Rishit Dagli

  17. Sahil Prasad

  18. Saifuddin Saifee

  19. Sarah Khan

  20. Shreyal Gupta

  21. Siddharth Bhatia

  22. Smit Jethva

  23. Sreekaran Srinath

  24. Vedant Panchal

  25. Viranchee Lotia

  26. Wilfred Almeida

  27. Jaden Furtado

  28. Anil Harwani

  29. Arun Kumar

  30. Atmaj Koppikar

  31. Isihita Rakchhit

  32. Minal Verma

  33. Manshi

  34. Aditya Barmol

  35. Anamika Ratna

  36. Anshu Roy

  37. Arushi

  38. Disha

  39. Gazz

  40. Gaurav Panjabi

  41. Jia Harisinghani

  42. Hrishikesh Dhuri

  43. Kunal Chhablani

  44. Meet Morpana

  45. Muskan

  46. Navya Agarwal

  47. Neetika Tandon

  48. Payal Narwal

  49. Priyanshu Gupta

  50. Rashid Aziz

  51. Shreya

  52. Soni Darshan

  53. Trisha Tomy

  54. Chhavi Nain

  55. Harsh Khatri

  56. Jiya

  57. Jyotika

  58. Maitri

  59. Manjusha Iyer

Meet Screenshot

Meet #114 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #113

Date: 07-01-2023

Duration: 4 hrs 2 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General introductions.

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about C programming concepts that are ostensibly simple yet difficult to apply.

    • The most basic and confusing concepts include Strings and Pointers.

    • He specifically talked about how numerous functions with similar applications existed such as gets(), fgets(), getline(), etc for String input. The difference is small and a new user usually gets confused at first.

  • Re-learning C after using higher-level languages is an arduous process since these languages abstract away the need to handle certain conditions, especially memory management.

    • C and C++ should be learned properly since they are still preferred for performance and latency-sensitive tasks.

  • Anil Harwani talked about multiple reasons behind C’s importance in the industry.

    • Embedded Systems support C because they have a bad performance in general and cannot accommodate resources for higher-level languages.

  • Anil Harwani exemplified how a normal person might select a language to add a million numbers.

    • If people use C, then they might end up writing inefficient code which doesn’t leverage most of the computer resources, because most people don’t know how to manage memory properly.

    • Due to this, the ironic thing is that Python would end up performing better.

      • People would end up using libraries such as NumPy which do a relatively decent job of utilizing most of the resources.

    • One important thing to remember though is that the answer to such questions changes based on the situation. These are questions that should be asked before jumping to solving the presented problem/question. For instance

      • What kind of input numbers are these? Integers? Decimals?

      • How quickly does the problem need to be solved?

      • How often does one need to solve the question?

      • What is the scale of the problem?

      • Does the question really need to be solved as fast as possible?

  • In the last CatchUp (#112) we had a watch party on How to build a compiler using LLVM.

    • Anil Harwani talked about the compilation of a program to Assembly code.

      • We also talked about the process of Loop Unrolling and Vectorization.

  • We looked at spec.org which showcases CPU benchmark scores and the procedures that were followed to get those results.

    • CPU manufacturers use these scores to estimate where improvements are possible and compare processors.

  • We talked about physical and virtual memory and how the address is calculated.

    • This evolved into a conversation about how programs separate their execution blocks in the memory.

      • The concept of Segmentation is utilized in the physical memory and hard drive as well, to allocate a data storage range and prevent overriding other process' data during execution.

      • Then there came a need for Physical and Virtual Memory.

      • There were attacks that exploited virtual memory as well and it gave a rise to Paging. The OS handles the page table and generates a virtual address and this address is mapped and converted into a physical address by the OS.

      • Paging became critical since virtual addresses could be guessed by programs easily, but Row Hammer was an attack that still caused issues.

        • A RAM is organized in rows and columns of bits, and Row Hammer is a technique to flip bits in the same row by bit-banging a specific pattern of bits which causes bits to flip, which can causes issues.

  • Anil Harwani shared a Memory Latency Test by Chips and Cheese - a tool to measure the memory latency in computers.

    • It tries to check the latency of the L1, L2 and L3 CPU Caches.

    • We checked the difference between two PCs by overlaying and comparing the values in the graph. This showcased the developments made in the newer devices and how the graph for latency over time was smoother for newer processors while older processors had erratic graphs with sharp curves.

  • We talked about the difference between a Telephone Cable and an Ethernet Cable.

    • An Ethernet Cable is more sheathed than a Telephone Cable since it needs to handle higher currents, which induces a larger EMF than in Telephone wires. The thicker sheath in Ethernet Cables reduces the chance of data corruption through EMF interference and induced current problems.

  • Jaden Furtado tried to help Jainam Jagani with debugging his web extension with Manifest v3 issues.

  • Jaden Furtado shared how he hacked Starbucks India and had access to the online and offline payment data of all Indian customers due to API keys hard-coded in their app’s source code.

    • He found quite a few other vulnerabilities as well.

    • Starbucks India acknowledged his responsible disclosure, fixed the problems he had pointed out and compensated him with far less than he deserved, due to 'a change in their policies'.

  • Jaden Furtado also shared that his final year project ScanRE was about scanning GitHub repositories to find vulnerabilities.

    • He is using one of his idle PCs to run this project and find any vulnerabilities.

Attendees

  1. Anas Khan

  2. Aryan Nayak

  3. Ashwin Kumar Uppala

  4. Ayush Chauhan

  5. Harsh Kapadia

  6. Jai Dewani

  7. Jainam Jagani

  8. Kaushal Joshi

  9. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  10. Ninad Naik

  11. Pranav Dani

  12. Pratik Thakare

  13. Ramyak Mehra

  14. Rishit Dagli

  15. Sahil Prasad

  16. Sarah Khan

  17. Sreekaran Srinath

  18. Vedant Panchal

  19. Wilfred Almeida

  20. Jaden Furtado

  21. Anil Harwani

  22. Aryan Maurya

  23. Ayesha Nagdawala

  24. Dhruv Vaidya

  25. Eshaan Vaswani

  26. Hiten Gerella

  27. Hrishikesh Dhuri

  28. Jia Harisinghani

  29. Raghav Rathi

  30. Rhea Mansharamani

  31. Romil Raina

  32. Yash Wavdankar

Meet Screenshot

Meet #113 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #112

Date: 31-12-2022

Duration: 2 hrs 55 mins

Happy New Year 🎉🎉

Fun fact: There are 14.3% chances that we will have Saturday on December 31st.

Topics Discussed

  • We watched Writing a compiler with LLVM, it’s a talk about LLVM and how one can write a compiler using it.

    • We talked about how LLVM acts as a middleman (Intermediate Representation) for compilers, which makes the job of compilers easier as they don’t have to handle different architectures like ARM, x86, etc. themselves and just need to compile to LLVM, which in turn handles all other architectures.

    • We all were awed on seeing how LLVM understands and reduces unnecessary complications in code by using various optimization techniques.

  • Krishna Gadia shared about the ownership problems he is facing at the workplace.

    • The issue he is facing is that people are not able to complete a task on their own without disturbing others.

    • He said there could be three ways to deal with this:

      • Train them if they are facing any technical issues.

      • Warn them and help them if they are facing issues in their personal life.

      • Replace them.

  • We talked about Wilfred Almeida's MobXcess, a mobile app used to run predetermined commands on the server.

Project Showcased

Meet Screenshot

Meet #112 screenshot

Watch Party Screenshot

Watching 'Writing a compiler with LLVM' at OTC CatchUp #112

OTC CatchUp #111

Date: 24-12-2022

Duration: 5 hrs 32 mins

Topics Discussed

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Anas Khan

  3. Ashwin Kumar Uppala

  4. Ayush Bhosle

  5. Ayush Chauhan

  6. Darshan Rander

  7. Dheeraj Lalwani

  8. Harsh Kapadia

  9. Himanshu Sharma

  10. Ishan Sharma

  11. Jainam Jagani

  12. Jay Kaku

  13. Ninad Naik

  14. Pranav Dani

  15. Pranil Chitre

  16. Pratik Thakare

  17. Rishit Dagli

  18. Sainath Poojary

  19. Saket Thota

  20. Sarah Khan

  21. Sreekaran Srinath

  22. Tushar Nankani

  23. Vedant Kakde

  24. Viranchee Lotia

  25. Wilfred Almeida

  26. Jaden Furtado

  27. Aditya Tripathi

  28. Akhil Sahu

  29. Aman Raj

  30. Anil Harwani

  31. Chinmay Tullu

  32. Farhan Khan

  33. Harsh Sharma

  34. Manish Dusa

  35. Meet Morpana

  36. Jia Harisinghani

  37. Piyush Makhija

  38. Priyam Shah

  39. Sejal Jain

  40. Shailesh Thakur

  41. Snigdha Reddy Pulim

  42. Tanya

  43. Vijay Jaisankar

  44. Sachin Jangir

Meet Screenshot

Meet #111 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #110

Date: 17-12-2022

Duration: 4 hrs 24 mins

Topics Discussed

Meet Screenshot

Meet #110 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #109

Date: 10-12-2022

Duration: 4 hrs 32 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General Introductions.

  • We talked about people’s views and opinions about ChatGPT.

    • ChatGPT knows the structure of how a sentence or a conversation should be formed but it lacks specificity and hence falls short.

    • We also talked about how it might eliminate some jobs in the future.

    • Tushar Nankani shared his experience of trying to write a professional document using ChatGPT and the result was quite convincing.

  • Harsh Kapadia shared a Youtube Playlist by thenewboston for Manas to learn C programming.

  • We discussed some ways for how one could manage college and coding simultaneously.

    • Harsh Kapadia shared how he gets to learn a lot from lectures in his master’s program and thus suggested trying sitting for lectures and if the teaching is good then finish it there.

    • Handle all the assignments and complete tasks in college itself and do whatever you want to do at home.

  • We talked about what TCP and HTTP are before Harsh Kapadia showcased his project.

    • The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the most widely used protocols on the internet for reliable data transfer.

    • HTTP is an application layer protocol for fetching resources such as HTML documents.

  • Jay Kaku suggested some resources to learn CSS for Chiranjeev to solve his issues with CSS.

  • Darshan Rander shared an article about Dart Beta 3 release.

  • We officially Announced OTC Talks on Twitter and Telegram.

  • Tushar Nankani tried to debug his project, blurrit — to restrict it to WhatsApp Web and the shortcut key that clashes with the system Ctrl + Shift + Z.

  • Tushar Nankani and Dheeraj Lalwani talked about how manifest v3 for chrome extensions lacks community support.

    • One potential reason behind pushing manifest v3 could be related to reducing support for adblockers as most of the revenue comes from ads.

  • Hardik Raheja and Darshan Rander talked about CBDC complementing, rather than replacing current forms of money.

    • We also discussed how UPI works offline and the differences between e-Rupee and UPI.

  • We discussed our experiences with DevFest Mumbai Meetup.

    • Replit and GHFD meetup was referenced again.

    • We discussed multiple perspectives about DevFest while trying to understand who the meetup was oriented towards.

      • The event was mostly attended by students, and what differed were the intentions, motivation and expectations of the attendees.

    • Overall, the meetup was a good experience with a sophisticated setting.

  • Pranav Dani, Tushar Nankani and Hardik Raheja talked about human tendencies to click photos and videos and how it might affect one’s experience.

    • Building upon its implications, we talked about how FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is one of the factors that drive social media images.

  • Saifuddin Saifee and Pratik Thakare talked about the subject of scrapping your old work.

Projects Showcased

Attendees

  1. Chiranjeev Srivastava

  2. Darshan Rander

  3. Dheeraj Lalwani

  4. Hardik Raheja

  5. Harsh Kapadia

  6. Jay Kaku

  7. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  8. Pranav Dani

  9. Pratik Kundnani

  10. Pratik Thakare

  11. Sahil Prasad

  12. Saifuddin Saifee

  13. Siddharth Kaduskar

  14. Sreekaran Srinath

  15. Tushar Nankani

  16. Vedant Panchal

  17. Amit

  18. Anil Gohan

  19. Atharva

  20. Dheer Bathija

  21. Dhruv Vaidya

  22. Drish Chhabria

  23. Jainam Jagani

  24. Joe Burn

  25. Kishan Wali

  26. Manas Thadhani

  27. Navrangi Shukla

  28. Jia Harisinghani

  29. Priya Golani

  30. Raj Yadav

  31. Saachi Kokate

  32. Sagnik Tarafdar

  33. Sarvesh Parab

  34. Sarvesh Shukla

  35. Utkarsh Mhatre

  36. Vaidehi Purohit

Meet Screenshot

Meet #109 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #108

Date: 03-12-2022

Duration: 3 hrs 12 mins

Topics Discussed

  • We helped Atharva Jadhav in figuring out how to begin backend development.

    • We suggested he either start with Flask or Express as a beginner.

    • We asked him to learn through YouTube instead of a course as it is free and he might learn something new while looking it up on YouTube instead of following a course.

    • Harsh Kapadia suggested a few YouTube Channels —

    • Yash Pimple suggested JavaScript Mastery channel.

  • We announced OTC Talks, talks which will happen before catchup once or twice a month.

  • Darshan Rander, Harsh Kapadia and Tushar Nankani talked about the difference between throttling and debouce.

    • Throttling is when you intentionally delay a call.

    • Debouce will merge multiple calls into a single one following some rules.

  • Rishit Dagli shared his CS theory notes.

  • Pranav Dani talked about an issue he was facing with JioFiber, where he couldn’t make a request to https://raw.githubusercontent.com domain.

    • He fixed it by changing his DNS to 1.1.1.1

  • Harsh Kapadia asked Tushar Nankani to write a blog from his tweets about his projects based on Web Animations.

    • Aditya Oberai said that blogs and Twitter are two different places as one caters to long-form content and the other short-form.

    • Darshan Rander added that how basics things might look there is someone out there who might need help with it.

  • Aditya Oberai explained why Appwrite has documentation to work with Docker. As it is easier to start with for beginners and Docker is also OCI compliant so if anyone else wants to use it somewhere else they can easily work with images as well.

  • Jay Kaku shared his experience at a CTF where they had a consistent rank of 8 in the first two rounds and could make it to finals because of semester exams.

  • We talked about the difference between VPN and WARP.

    • WARP finds a route to the destination server with lesser congestion.

Project showcase

Attendees

  1. Aditya Oberai

  2. Anas Khan

  3. Ashwin Kumar Uppala

  4. Ayush Chauhan

  5. Chiranjeev Srivastava

  6. Darshan Rander

  7. Dhiraj Chauhan

  8. Harsh Kapadia

  9. Himanshu Sharma

  10. Jay Kaku

  11. Mustafa Saifee

  12. Poonam Jha

  13. Pranav Dani

  14. Rishit Dagli

  15. Saifuddin Saifee

  16. Siddharth Bhatia

  17. Siddharth Kaduskar

  18. Tushar Nankani

  19. Viranchee Lotia

  20. Wilfred Almeida

  21. Jaden Furtado

  22. Abhishek Gaud

  23. Anil Harwani

  24. Atharva Jadhav

  25. D.B. Cooper

  26. Dipesh Todi

  27. Simran Yelave

  28. Gaurav Vaishya

  29. Harshit Raheja

  30. Harshvardhan Patil

  31. Hiten Gerella

  32. Jainam Jagani

  33. Jiya Jagiasi

  34. Keval Majithia

  35. Namit Gandhi

  36. Jia Harisinghani

  37. Saachi Kokate

  38. Sagar Agicha

  39. Shravanesh Mestry

  40. Suchit Jagiasi

  41. Varun Singh

  42. Yash Pimple

Meet Screenshot

Meet #108 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #107

Date: 26-11-2022

Duration: 5 hrs 17 mins

Topics Discussed

  • We talked about how everyone feels about GDG MAD's tweet on Devfest Mumbai.

    • Everyone had mixed feelings about it, as a marketing technique it was fabulous but sometimes it was a bit insulting.

  • Siddharth Bhatia was curious to explore how he can run games in GitHub Codespaces.

  • Darshan Rander asked others about how they feel using online code editor tools like GitPod, or GitHub Codespaces as he doesn’t feel natural while using them.

    • Siddharth Bhatia suggested that it might be good for beginners as they don’t need to take that extra effort to setup the environment.

    • Ishan Sharma uses them for projects where he might do a contribution once and might not want to setup everything for that.

  • Siddharth Bhatia asked how one can run GUI apps in these online code editors.

  • Darshan Rander shared neverinstall, a service that allows you to run a few applications such as Android Studio, VSCode and more on the cloud with GUI on the browser.

  • Ishan Sharma shared Flipper Zero.

    • A pen-testing tool that can capture and transmit certain radio frequencies.

    • We talked about how one can use NFC on their phone to get data from NFC-enabled cards.

    • We talked about the difference between RFID and NFC.

      • TLDR; NFC is a branch of High-Frequency (HF) RFID and you can have p2p communication in NFC but not in RFID.

  • Wilfred Almeida asked how he can have security in UDP.

    • Darshan Rander said that he can look at QUIC protocol as it is also based on UDP.

    • Wilfred Almeida has already made a UDP server.

    • UDP is used to share data such as game streaming and sending application logs to the server as it eliminates the need to have a TCP handshake which takes a lot of time.

  • Ishan Sharma shared his talk about Web Animations from Devfest Chennai.

    • He gave a quick walkthrough of the talk on catchup.

    • Harsh Kapadia asked him what inspired him to go deeper into the Web Animations APIs and when one should know that they should stop.

      • Ishan Sharma said he was always curious about animations on the web and this gave him a nudge to learn them. He suggested stopping when it starts to become boring for you.

  • Ishan Sharma shared that he would be speaking at xtremejs.dev next month.

Attendees

  1. Ayush Chauhan

  2. Chiranjeev Srivastava

  3. Darshan Rander

  4. Dheeraj Lalwani

  5. Dhiraj Chauhan

  6. Hardik Raheja

  7. Harsh Kapadia

  8. Himanshu Sharma

  9. Ishan Sharma

  10. Kaustubh Khavnekar

  11. Krishna Gadia

  12. Pranav Dani

  13. Rishit Dagli

  14. Siddharth Bhatia

  15. Siddharth Kaduskar

  16. Sreekaran Srinath

  17. Viranchee Lotia

  18. Wilfred Almeida

  19. Yohan Gupta

  20. Jaden Furtado

  21. Abhishek Gaud

  22. Anvee Shetye

  23. Atharva

  24. Gaurav Vaishya

  25. Jainam Jagani

  26. Janhavi

  27. Kishan Wali

  28. Manas Thadhani

  29. Meet Morpana

  30. Paul Atreides

  31. Prathamesh Karambelkar

  32. Pushkar Aggrawal

  33. Saachi Kokate

  34. Somya Barwa

  35. Atharva Yadav

  36. Giridhar Ramesh

Meet Screenshot

Meet #107 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #106

Date: 19-11-2022

Duration: 7 hrs 15 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Pranav Dani and Harsh Kapadia discussed the banal Page rules and CNAME configuration for Cloudflare which might be new for most users.

  • Darshan Rander shared a Udacity Course for Android dev resources since Sadik wanted some resources.

  • Darshan Rander discussed Dall E and its use cases for AI and ML applications.

  • Chiranjeev Srivastava shared Holopin tags and created a new GitHub repository for showcasing them on his profile.

  • Jaden Furtado unknowingly ran a FUD (Fully Undetectable) malware multiple times thinking that it was a library for his use case.

    • The malware essentially steals files from the host machine and sends them to a remote server.

    • Link for the virus → Websocketd (Do not run ⚠️).

    • Darshan Rander modified the wiki for the repository with the malicious links.

  • We discussed how doing assignments diligently could be beneficial for most students.

  • Darshan Rander and Pratik Thakare shared that they were working on a WhatsApp chat analysis web app using Nuxt 3 for the front end and Rust for its backend which is supposed to compile in Wasm and run on the client side to reduce server load.

  • We talked about the working behind Wasm.

    • WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine.

    • Harsh Kapadia shared the MDN docs to refer syntax for Wasm.

  • Jay Kaku shared how a processor is initialized in the bootloader while he was talking about his BE project.

  • Jaden Furtado shared that the Passport office screens still use Java-based applets which can be accessed by anyone near the screen through a browser.

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about the approach that he used in designing the structure for the java based game he showcased today.

    • Gitpod was using Java 8 which was not able to directly compile the .java files, so he found an article that suggests that Java 11 supports direct execution of .java files.

  • Pranav Dani compared NS2 with GENI, but GENI does not simulate the network but rather provides the actual computers that could be logged into to check the network status.

    • We can also check the router tables for each router.

  • We talked about the Pegasus spyware and how it has been used to spy on critics and opponents.

  • Notion recently introduced AI which helps to generate the text content based on the pointers that the user provides in the document.

    • We talked about an AI system for generating research papers which failed miserably since its output was biased and gibberish.

    • Article

      • One tagline for Galactica was: “Type a text and Galactica will generate a paper with relevant references, formulas, and everything.”

  • Pranav Dani and Siddharth Bhatia talked about how they use Obsidian and txt files for storing notes and information.

    • Siddharth Bhatia suggested the use of tags and a combination of folders over the graph view since it helps in easily segregating the notes.

    • Changelog Plugin for Obsidian.

  • We talked about the Twitter issues and profitability of Twitter blue.

    • Recent impersonation of fake accounts such as Lockheed Martin, the government contractor, for weapons manufacturing and drones for the US led to the suspension of contracts since the sales and stock prices dropped after false messages were spread.

    • Someone suggested that Elon Musk plans to create a Twitter superapp, similar to WeChat in China.

  • Siddharth Bhatia talked about Mastodon servers and how they are decentralized.

  • Sreekaran Srinath showcased his new drone: DJI Mavic Mini 2.

Projects Showcased

  • Dhiraj Chauhan shared his project called Anchor Tsmodel Transpiler built using TypeScript and Shell.

    • It is a transpiler that converts anchor programs from idl to typescript `models/interfaces. It helps with the conversion of JSON to TS.

    • GitHub Repo

  • Harsh Kapadia showcased Legends: Monsters and Heroes built using Java.

    • It is a terminal-based RPG with a Pokémon-type exploratory world board. Heroes can move across the board to battle with monsters and access markets to buy items.

    • The game is designed to explore Object Oriented Principles.

  • Harsh Kapadia also showcased Reliable Transport Protocols built using Java.

    • It is a simulator implementing Stop-and-Wait (Alternating-Bit) Protocol, Selective-Repeat Protocol (with Cumulative Acknowledgements) and Go-Back-N Protocol (with Selective Acknowledgements).

    • The implementation has to handle a lossy and corrupting medium while implementing the protocols. The assignment instruction and starter code can be found here: networking.harshkapadia.me/tcp

  • Harsh Kapadia showcased a project based on GENI to showcase Designing Subnets.

    • It is a GENI project that aims at creating subnets and assigning IP addresses based on those subnets to routers and hosts, making hosts within a LAN and hosts across LANs communicate with each other.

    • The lab instructions are available at witestlab.poly.edu/blog/designing-subnets.

Meet Screenshot

Meet #106 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #105

Date: 12-11-2022

Duration: 4 hrs 10 mins

Topics Discussed

  • OTC CatchUp completes 2 years 🥳

  • Dhiraj Chauhan shared his experience as a panelist in the discussions at HackTheLeague conducted in Mumbai.

    • He also pointed out how many discussions tend to avoid talking about failures.

    • Failures could be a great learning experience and should be discussed.

    • Prathik Shetty shared a tweet referencing this talk.

  • Anushka Bhagchandani, Dheeraj Lalwani and Pranav Dani talked about Twitter’s current situation and how not addressing them is having catastrophic effects on the stock market for companies due to scams.

    • The policy of paying $8 for account verification leads to "Blue tick scams" where fake replicas of accounts tweeting wrong information dwindle the company’s reputation and stock value.

    • This issue creates obscurity in who one is supposedly following.

    • The Accessibility team was fired along with many other important teams.

  • Chiranjeev Srivastava shared his experiences with communities and how he wants to create a precedent for students in Lucknow.

    • We talked about how signing bonds for companies might be illegal.

      • Chiranjeev Srivastava shared that he was placed at his company with a training period of 3 months and hasn’t been asked to sign a bond yet.

    • He also talked about how he feels that metros seem to be more privileged in terms of opportunities.

      • While location can provide some benefits initially, skills tend to overpower the parameter of location over a longer period.

  • Tushar Nankani talked about how "connections" as a term while talking about meetups feels a bit artificial since it should be a byproduct of getting to know a person as a "friend".

    • Although LinkedIn is a platform for connections, it skimps on the part of creating friends.

  • We talked about how one could access Twitter to learn something new.

    • Reference: Summary from the last CatchUp.

  • We discussed the feature of announcement channels introduced in WhatsApp and issues that could be potentially worked upon.

    • It links multiple groups together and doesn’t provide the feature of keeping private groups which could be useful for admins.

    • Telegram currently provides a feature to integrate APIs with bots which are helpful for the automation of regular tasks.

    • WhatsApp web and the desktop app for windows feel incomplete with many broken and unpolished features.

  • Jaden Furtadotalked about his experience around CTF embedded security

    • His team stood eighth in the competition. Link to the tweet.

    • He also shared some interesting questions that were asked in the test.

      • Questions had embedded passwords in some form.

      • Some had passwords embedded in MP3 waveform which he deciphered using Audacity.

      • Some passwords were reverse-engineered in the executable file.

      • Some were also hidden under a seemingly innocuous executable file which was deciphered using the file command.

    • He shared a telnet-based problem, where the username was supposed to be sent as a request to the open port which he sent using flask.

    • Chiranjeev Srivastava shared a similar type of competition that was conducted at his college where the student had to guess the code using output.

      • No test case was provided.

      • Input and output is the only thing provided, based on which the student had to guess the code.

      • Sample file for the same.

  • Darshan Rander shared his a [blog](https://blog.darshanrander.com/posts/diary/otc-and-me/) where he wrote about his experience and learning with OTC.

  • Chiranjeev Srivastava talked about an accident detection and prevention system based on OpenCV for his IoT project.

  • Saket Thota talked about his BE project where he wanted to decide to scale his projects.

    • He thought of using AWS for React and Deep learning projects.

    • Pranav Dani suggested that scaling should start when the number of users increases beyond the capacity of the free tier for any hosting platform.

    • Jaden Furtadosuggested writing it in the form of microservices and making each of the services asynchronous.

  • Pranav Dani suggested thodinproject.com to Chiranjeev Srivastava for learning react and web development.

  • We talked about the effects of the recession in India based on its dependence on countries.

  • Pranav Dani shared how uploading an mp4 or mkv video format file takes a long time to upload on google drive, whereas uploading the same file with a random renamed extension takes very less time.

    • Jaden Furtadosuggested that this was a case of mime file type where google avoids further scanning of the file and Hardik suggested that it just adds it to the drive without bothering about its playability.

  • Jaden Furtadoexplained the process of data transmission over the network and how anomaly or noise is expected in such transmissions since one cannot send complete data over the air.

    • He talked about the journey of electric waves where multiple data streams are combined into a Fourier transform and then smashed into a single sine wave stream and sent over the network.

    • PDF file format was discussed and he said that most PDF tools do not follow this structure.

Projects Showcased

  • Jaden Furtadoshowcased his project Static Analysis which identifies and records vulnerabilities in the code on GitHub or GitLab.

    • It was built with scaling in mind.

      • He used celery for task queueing and processing sequentially.

Meet Screenshot

Meet #105 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #104

Date: 05-11-2022

Duration: 4 hrs 47 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Tushar Nankani shared his learnings from an article that pushed him to read more about cores, processors, threads, cache and sockets.

  • Wilfred Almeida talked about problems he was facing with AES ciphers and its use case in one of his projects.

  • We talked about Meltdown and Spectre which are vulnerabilities in modern processors.

    • Meltdown is patched in all the major OS.

  • Tushar Nankani talked about the thought process behind writing the tweet regarding his recent project blurrit.

    • He talked about how the tweet and the poster seemed clickbait-ey to some since it did not elaborate on its functionality, as it only talked about how it might make someone feel. (Safer in this case)

    • Aditya Oberai suggested that marketing a product in this way isn’t wrong, since one isn’t selling the product, but the impact it creates.

  • We talked about recent layoffs and the potential reasons for the overvaluation of companies during the pandemic which led to the layoffs. A good example could be Signal.

    • Twitter recently underwent many changes in leadership and as a result, many employees were laid off.

    • Ashwin Kumar Uppala and Tushar Nankani shared layoffs.fyi as a resource to find out about layoffs in tech companies.

    • Decrease in business could be a potential reason for layoffs since it results in a decrease in revenue.

    • Sreekaran Srinath talked about how stock prices for companies were decreasing in value.

  • We talked about some platforms such as MS Teams and Zoom that gained traction over the pandemic period and now serves as an integral part of the system.

    • MS Teams is catered towards enterprises with its tight integration with Office365 tools and provides a relatively better experience in terms of handling bandwidth at even lower tiers.

  • Ramyak Mehra talked about Dyte and its functionalities while comparing it with 100ms.

  • Aditya Oberai talked about how some layoff panics are a part of the echo chamber, where the layoff news seems to be exaggerated and amplified by multiple people.

    • Layoffs might hurt less when you are early in your career without many dependencies.

  • Darshan Rander talked about potential reasons behind not choosing a startup, where one does not get any form of guidance or a course correction wherever the candidate might go wrong.

    • Aditya Oberai talked about the status of an individual contributor that is allowed by startups which helps with a personal brand.

    • Vatsal Patel talked about the importance of feedback from seniors and how it might be lacking in startups.

    • When upper management isn’t there to guide, one could also work at their own pace and reduce bureaucracy.

    • A company should be selected after weighing all the pros and cons.

  • Vatsal Patel shared his experience with releasing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 at Activision and all the challenges encountered in the process including team management.

  • Darshan Rander shared that he’s going to give a talk about "Server Side Dart" at MWC Meetup.

  • Jay Kaku talked about the process behind building his final-year hardware project in which he had to learn about how most basic components work.

  • We talked about the ostensibly sad state of the USA’s gun laws and how it is a major reason behind the high number of deaths due to gun violence.

  • We discussed how multiple customers tend to compare cars based on vibrations and the kind of sound that it makes which seems redundant, especially when talking about electric cars.

  • Jay Kaku talked about AMD’s latest CPU lineup with a 5nm process and how the graphics technology with RDNA3 competes with Nvidia’s RTX 30 and 40 series.

  • Sreekaran Srinath, Tushar Nankani and Vatsal Patel discussed differences in engagements on social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok.

    • Twitter gives lower engagement for a new user with fewer/no followers.

    • Whereas, TikTok boosts their engagements to a great extent for new users and creators.

  • Jay Kaku asked about how to not get demotivated when preparing for DSA in interviews.

  • We discussed how we can find some good tech discussions and take value from these perspectives on Twitter.

Projects Showcased

  • Aditya Oberai shared his process of learning frontend where he tried to build a web project for converting English to banana language (Minion language).

Meet Screenshot

Meet #104 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #103

Date: 29-10-2022

Duration: 3 hrs 39 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Anas Khan asked Jaden Furtado how one can submit IP address in AbuseIP DB.

  • Darshan Rander shared his recent contributions to winget-cli and plus_plugins.

  • Darshan Rander asked Himanshu Sharma when you should clean your laptop from inside. Himanshu Sharma suggested doing it once in 6 months.

  • Jay Kaku shared the blog of IBM releasing a new chip for ML training.

    • Darshan Rander asked what is the difference between NVIDIA’s GPU, Google’s Tensor and this chip. To which Jay Kaku said the use cases of them are very different. NVIDIA is general, Tensor is for running the model and this one is for training them.

  • Jay Kaku shared a IBM’s Analog Hardware Acceleration Kit a project for AI development.

  • Harsh Kapadia, Darshan Rander and Aditya Oberai talked about deta.space and it’s future. - More on Deta Space

  • We talked about Kubernetes (K8s)

    • Rishit Dagli talked about his experience at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2022.

    • Rishit talked about the cost of running the K8s project and the improvements to the project’s registry in upcoming versions to make it more efficient so that all requests for packages are not made to the main K8s registry.

    • Rishit also told us about Release Engineering at K8s which handles all release procedures such as identifying flaky tests, deciding how to release a particular version, in what manner (phased or all at once), etc.

    • Rishit shared tests of some of the K8s projects

  • Aditya Oberai told us some of the matters that have to be decided upon when a company acquires another company and how complex they are.

    • User migration from one service to another

    • Codebase linting, policies and styling consistencies

    • Branding decisions and alignment

    • Service Level Agreement (SLA) changes

    • Business goals re-alignment

    • Independence level of the company getting acquired

    • Transitioning (fitting) employees, laying come employees off, handling employee stock conversions, deciding salaries, etc.

  • Aditya Oberai talked about the hostile takeover of Twitter, how the firing of Twitter higher-ups is not related to Recession, corporate buyouts and Golden Parachutes.

  • Aditya Oberai and Harsh Kapadia talked about how we all are too harsh on ourselves and how we need to understand ourselves better.

  • Aditya also touched upon the fact that good advice is nice to have, but one should understand the context in which it is presented. He talked about the importance of context to be able to understand multiple things and interpret and apply things well.

Projects Showcased

Meet Screenshot

Meet #103 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #102

Date: 22-10-2022

Duration: 5 hrs 11 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Happy Diwali 🪔

  • Anil Harwani asked Kartik Soneji to not copy code for assignments from others since by copying code, we will never learn to do it by ourselves.

  • Mustafa Saifee shared his plans with AWS’s upcoming student program.

    • The problem being targeted is students not being able to proper guidance.

    • With the program, they will try to tackle it by connecting AWS employees with the students.

    • Currently, the program is in focus groups where they are trying to learn more about what students expect and what motivates them to enroll.

  • Mustafa Saifee shared about his life experiences:

    • How he started with Mechanical Engineering and then dropped out to start again with Computer Science Engineering.

    • Later, he described how he got a job at Microsoft and now working in AWS.

  • Mustafa Saifee, Kartik Soneji and Darshan Rander talked about contributing in Open Source Softwares.

    • Mustafa Saifee said that making a PR to the project - even if it is not accepted - we would have learned a lot from it and that we could talk about it in interviews.

    • Kartik Soneji disagreed by saying that it would be better to know if the projects need it or not. This will show how an individual’s team skills are and you will also get the feeling of accomplishment that your code is running on thousands/millions of devices and helping others.

  • Kartik Soneji helped Jai Dewani to reverse engineer get.interviewready.io so that he can use PiP (Picture in picture) mode in it.

  • Kartik Soneji shared Tampermonkey a browser extension that is used to inject JS in websites.

  • Darshan Rander helped Wilfred Almeida to figure out state management dependency issue in his Flutter app.

Projects Showcased

Meet Screenshot

Meet #102 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #101

Date: 15-10-2022

Duration: 4 hrs 42 mins

Topics Discussed

  • We talked about Hacktoberfest and contributions to get started with.

    • Good First Issue tags on GitHub can help in finding good issues to contribute to.

  • Vinat Goyal shared his experience with ML at his internship.

    • He worked on an annotation tool for OCR.

      • Documents are treated as images for extracting data.

      • Tessaract is used to extract text from documents and create word embeddings.

  • Anil Harwani talked about SSH as a user application in the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) layers and how the OS (Operating System) handles it.

  • Rishit Dagli shared his approach to implementing AI and ML papers. Most of his time is spent solving the problem at hand using mathematics and tools can vary based on their implementation.

    • Software stack could be based on Python or JS.

  • Anil Harwani and Pranav Dani talked about OS modes to justify the reasons behind not installing Valorant on local devices. OS runs on two modes: The User mode and the Kernel mode.

    • Processes running in kernel mode have unrestricted access to the hardware. Processes running in user mode have limited access to the CPU and the memory.

    • Most applications run in user mode, and core operating system components run in kernel mode.

    • Valorant asks for user permissions to attach itself with the kernel mode to verify the device and "prevent cheating" during online matches.

      • Since the game drivers have kernel mode access, they can potentially send any data about the local system to its servers that could not be trusted.

  • Anil Harwani talked about SMM - System Management Mode (Also known as ring -2) while explaining how the concept of Hypervisor and Virtual machines was established.

  • Pranav Dani talked about his way of approaching reference books and articles, where he tends to read more about a term or topic that he doesn’t understand and then return to the text for better context.

    • Anil Harwani suggested a more efficient way to separate the forest and the trees by putting bookmarks on the topics which one doesn’t understand and then batching all the bookmarks and re-reading the text.

    • Some intriguing points to think about:

      • Incentive motivates people to do some work.

      • Learn to let go.

      • Intent can’t be separated from perception.

  • We talked about inefficiencies in TCP, but the practice of using it stuck since it was easier to learn and implement for novice users.

  • The problem with UDP is that data might not be received in sequence.

    • The advantage of using UDP is the ability to broadcast packets over the subnet.

  • Anil Harwani talked about the yellow book (yellow pages) and how phone operators redirected users to common requirements. This issue was later fixed by an undertaker in the form of automatic telephone number routing.

  • Darshan Rander validated the credibility of Linux Kernel documentation resources for reading sensor data.

  • Wilfred Almeida talked about JWT tokens and how he handles the expiry limit.

  • Darshan Rander talked about project idea a project idea about performing analysis on the front end.

  • Poonam Jha and Darshan Rander talked about work at MNC.

    • Transition from MNC to startup is difficult since work pressure increases.

  • We talked about the "apparent" discrepancy between "Think thrice before you say something" and how it might separate someone from their true nature.

    • Kindness is important, and sometimes being kind is a default nature for people.

  • Poonam Jha talked about writing an article for documenting roles existing in the IT industry so that it could help people in becoming aware of the various opportunities available.

Projects Showcased

  • Harsh demonstrated packet tracing (ACK) for SSH applications using Wireshark.

    • He talked about how handshakes work.

    • Every keystroke in SSH terminal is synchronized with the server after which a response is sent back.

    • Harsh shared an article where he documented his learnings about SSH - SSH.

      • He demonstrated this behavior by pressing l and s and verifying it with Wireshark.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #100

Date: 08-10-2022

Duration: 9 hrs 48 mins

Topics Discussed

  • We completed OTC CatchUps for 100 consecutive weeks 🥳

  • Anil Harwani shared the github.com/esnet/iperf repository which is a measurement of TCP, UDP and SCTP network bandwidth.

  • Anil Harwani explained how a packet travels from the network card to application. "Path of a packet in the Linux kernel stack" explains it in-depth.

  • Anil Harwani shared how DPDK (Data plane development kit) handles the networking in most mainframes.

  • Anil Harwani showed us some of the lesser known Linux commands.

    • lscpu - lscpu gathers CPU architecture information sysfs, /proc/cpuinfo and any applicable architecture-specific libraries (e.g. Librtas on PowerPC).

    • w - w displays the information about the users currently on the machine, and their processes.

    • wall - wall displays a message, or the contents of a file, or otherwise its standard input, on the terminals of all currently logged in users.

  • Anil Harwani spoke about jumbo frames which makes transmission fasters as the frame size are bigger which in turn takes less time to process.

  • Anil Harwani shared how a workaround in Linux Kernel was hurting modern AMD’s performance.

  • Anil Harwani showed how screen command in Linux helps him in his workflow.

    • screen command in Linux provides the ability to launch and use multiple shell sessions from a single ssh session.

  • Harsh Kapadia shared Missing semester by MIT which is a course to learn the basics of Linux and networking.

  • We watched a funny video where an old finance minister of India talks about Tech and the Cloud.

  • Sreekaran Srinath pointed out an issue with '/' at the end of the CatchUp summary page.

  • Sreekaran Srinath, Darshan Rander, Pratik Thakare and Kartik Soneji voted, discussed, argued, and decided on contracting a multimillion-dollar corporation to deliver heat-sterilized dough and cheese discs with an industry-standard pipeline. Optimized the landing cost to area ratio of aforementioned discs.

Projects Showcased

  • Harsh Kapadia showcased his "Socket Programming: Measuring RTT and Throughput of a network connection" where he is measuring RTT and throughput using Java for his college assignment.

Meet Screenshot

Meet #100 screenshot

OTC CatchUp #99

Date: 01-10-2022

Duration: 6 hrs 4 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Dheeraj Lalwani encouraged everyone to participate in the Credit Suisse Global Coding Challenge (GCC) 4.0.

  • Mustafa Saifee shared his plan for pursuing a Masters Degree in Canada.

    • He suggested choosing Canada over US for Masters because of better job opportunities.

    • He also suggested to choose British Columbia over Ontario because it is closed to Seattle and Vancouver.

  • We discussed about Hacktoberfest and how this year it isn’t all about code but also about designs, tests, blogs and writing documentation.

  • Kartik Soneji gave a few pointers on how to effectively contribute to open source.

    • He encouraged everyone to use more open source software, find improvements in that software and contribute to those respective projects.

    • He also suggested everyone to consider contributing to Asciidoctor

  • We also discussed about the recent CodeCell event — Race2Stack and how answers to some of the questions were visible in the source of the Google Form because of client-side regex validation.

  • Kaushal Joshi asked the use for Static File Storage, and Deta Drive, Firebase Storage, Cloudinary were some of the few names which came up during the discussion.

  • Jay Aslaliya told everyone how he is exploring Machine Learning and Dheeraj Lalwani suggested him to not only focus on the theory but also to get hands on with datasets from Kaggle and to also read research papers.

  • We had a Solana debugging session where Kartik Soneji was trying to debug a smart contract.

  • We also talked about Remote procedure call(RPC).

  • Jaden Furtado told everyone that he was working on The Graph which is an indexing protocol for querying networks like Ethereum and IPFS.

  • Ayush Chauhan shared how he got a DevRel role at Solana.

  • Kartik Soneji asked about a grant for some ideas he had about developing on Solana.

  • We also discussed some pros and cons of Solana.

    • Pros: Increases transparency and security.

    • Cons: Inefficient and lack of valid use case.

  • Ayush Chauhan suggested that everyone with dev experience should experience NFTs and the blockchain atleast once.

  • Milan Chandiramani discussed about how software evolves rapidly and engineers have to keep themselves updated.

  • He also shared that he was studying about Quantum Computing and how it has the potential to break the modern web since it can break RSA and Diffie Hellman.

Projects Showcased

  • Saifuddin Saifee told everyone that he scrapped his previous portfolio and is rebuilding it with ReactJS.

  • Jaden Furtado showcased Sentence Grammar Checker which is an NLP and ML based peoject.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #98

Date: 24-09-2022

Duration: 4 hrs 2 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about new challenges that he is currently facing in the US.

    • He said that his assignments related to SQL and java are challenging but fun.

      • Some assignments were related to making an extensible Tic-tac-toe game using java, which would be later used to make a game called Order and Chaos (Order and Chaos is a variant of the game tic-tac-toe).

    • He also discussed how he used sockets to test throughput using java.

    • We talked about digital communication, how it is made secure using the public key cryptography and how digital certificates helps with that.

    • We then discussed how TLS and OCSP hits the certificate authority to verify the certificate.

  • Google Chrome will stop validating digital certificates.

  • Kaushal Joshi talked about blogging, freelance, internship, active search.

  • Anil Harwani started a discussion on the ability to focus while learning new things.

    • We are supposed to be studying right now so that we don’t regret.

    • Anil Harwani also pointed out how everything is a trade off and nothing is free even if it says free.

    • Time is extremely precious, it won’t come back.

    • Every decision is a trade-off.

    • We should not waste be wasting time when we have important things at hand.

    • Anil Harwani also pointed out how Indian kids rely so much on their parents.

    • He suggested us to make our food.

  • Anil Harwani shared how he used to optimise his time while he was studying in college. He used to challenge himself or read a book while he used to travel.

    • You need to hold yourself accountable since no one else will.

  • Harsh Kapadia talked about how he feels about passion being missing when students complete assignments. He feels most of them are more driven towards having an internship or a job.

    • Most Indian students do jobs or study engineering since it is a means to an end.

    • Nine times out of ten, a job is a means to an end and that’s why it’s called a job.

  • We discussed ways in which a processor can go idle to save power.

    • Clocked Gating. Clock gating is a power-saving feature in semiconductor microelectronics that enables switching off circuits.

    • Power Gating. Power gating is a technique used in integrated circuit design to reduce power consumption, by shutting off the current to blocks of the circuit that are not in use.

  • We talked about how foundational courses that colleges include in syllabus are very important to become a good software engineer.

    • Many people have lost the ability to dive deep into a topic and understand the crux of it.

    • Documenting ways to implement a project is not helpful for others since many people would then start building the same project even though they aren’t qualified to build it. This is a problem since people who do not understand what’s happening will then blame the creator.

      • A better way to write a document is to assume certain level of knowledge that the reader is expected to have and then provide small tips to optimise the work that they are expecting to do.

  • Dheeraj Lalwani shared an issue he faced at his internship where he changed a function’s response without realizing that it has been used in multiple places which led to a ripple effect breaking everything. Anil Harwani said that it could have been avoided with a simple search had he just checked once before where that particular function had been used.

    • Anil Harwani said, our generation has forgot to read code. He suggested to spend more time reading code and understanding its usage, and then writing code.

  • We then talked about Facts, axioms - that are true.

    • known known - things that we as humans understand.

    • known unknown - things that we don’t know.

    • unknown unknown - things that we don’t know (Someone puts efforts and makes it work).

  • Aryan Nayak talked about his work at the Amazon Search team and how they process all data of Amazon, storing in multi clusters, using Elastic search.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #97

Date: 17-09-2022

Duration: 5 hrs 10 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General Introductions.

  • Dheeraj Lalwani talked about the self organised Kurzgesagt meetup that he recently attended in Mumbai. The crowd was eclectic in terms of working background. He met a few like minded science enthusiasts as well.

  • Pranav Dani shared why he has a predilection towards subjects like OS and DSA which are heavily logic oriented and also form the foundation of computers in a way. While machine learning certainly has some benefits over traditional methods, it is undeniably resource heavy.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani ka major project, finite automata to a digital circuit

    • Anil Harwani in contrast suggested that many utilities such as the search engine that we use almost on a daily basis, work on the concept of heuristics. Machine learning is very useful in many scenarios which means that it is not a replacement for traditional methods but rather a supplement.

    • He also talked about the importance of having a good understanding of the fundamentals of any subject.

  • Anil Harwani talked about the Ice cream problem. Ice creams used to have less flavours such as chocolate or vanilla. People could choose any one and return home happily. Now flavours for ice creams have increased a lot, which means that their are too many choices for people to choose from.

    • Choices are comparable to problems. One needs to choose a flavour and keep working in that direction.

  • Nikunj Mistry had his doubts regarding databases and using Python. Dheeraj Lalwani suggested some projects and how he could learn and implement database concepts while making them.

  • Siddharth Bhatia shared his experience of hosting the Kurzgesagt meetup.

    • He was involved a lot in making sure that everyone had a good time.

    • Dheeraj Lalwani provided some feedback.

  • Saurabh Suryan shared that he recently moved to BLR as a frontend enginner working on React Native at a company called Jupiter Money. It uses a kotlin based backend.

  • We talked about how people have mixed feelings about using React Native, especially with data fetching, SWR and caching.

    • Saurabh Suryan shared that they use custom bindings over all the tools they use at their work.

  • Darshan Rander talked about his experience at Google Cloud Community Days 2022 - Mumbai. He got meet many experienced people, but the overall event was targetted towards students.

  • Saifuddin Saifee shared that he will be relaunching Technical Student Chapter (his community) as The Network.

  • Dhiraj Chauhan shared how he uses MLH influence to improve his community crowd.

    • He also talked about how it is different from MLH Guilds.

  • We talked about work culture at some companies. Some might try to introduce competition between employees to gain quicker profits, while others might try to make it a collaborative environment where growth is steady.

  • Dhiraj Chauhan and Darshan Rander talked about web3. Web2 is established and important and can do most of the work so it is better not to ignore web2 while learning more about web3.

  • We discussed how many websites nowadays might seem resource heavy. While novelty and design of a website surely matters, there should be a good balance between performance and practical design, since generally novelty drives web traffic.

    • Pranav Dani shared an example of a NICE website which has a bare minimum resource requirement and still conveys the information that it needs to. This website might be a bit too simplistic for most people to use and understand so there’s a requirement for balance.

  • Saifuddin Saifee and Pranav Dani talked about how people might have interests in many fields but choose to talk about only one of them according to the audience.

    • All the teams working on any product should have the sufficient knowledge of the parts of the product on which that team might not be working.

    • We also discussed that many people might have preconcieved notions about a particular field which might foment a person’s thinking in a certain direction about that field in general.

      • For instance, even though the term Fullstack Developer might be misleading upto some extent, most recruiters might have grown numb to the use of such words which could potentially reduce a candidates chances of getting selected.

  • Saifuddin Saifee suggested that college committees might not provide its member the complete authority to conduct events as per their wishes. This is one of the potential reasons due to which people might choose to form their own communities without college ties.

Projects Showcased

  • Abhishek showcased a MockUp for Flipkart that he made using HTML and CSS.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #96

😉 !eciN

Date: 10-09-2022

Duration: 6 hrs 35 mins

Topics Discussed

Projects Showcased

  • Rishit Dagli showcased his contribution to Akri where the contributor can comment /version major to release a major version and similarly for 'minor' or 'patch'.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #95

Date: 03-09-2022

Duration: 6 hrs 32 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Smit Jethva talked about how a person might reach a stagnanting point in a particular field where the solution might be to switch the domain to avoid being bored.

  • Pranav Dani asked the reasons why some people prefer startups over established corporates.

    • One of the most observed reasons might be to learn more about how to build a product in a relatively short amount of time.

    • Smit Jethva suggested that startups provide the complete entitlement and project ownership whereas corporate occupations frequently adhere to preset protocols that discourage ingenuity and creativity.

    • Darshan Rander said that startups might pay more than the established corporates. You are allowed to maintain public entitlement for a project that was built for the startup which helps in your personal brand.

  • Piush Paul talked about how a master’s degree could improve employment prospects.

    • There are certain cases where the candidates get chosen on the basis of their knowledge and experience which might be equivalent to a degree.

  • Darshan Rander talked about an idea for writing a paper for mapping out all the possibilities in a 9X9 tic tac toe.

    • Each player essentially decides the further moves for the opponent in bejofo.net/ttt - An emulator for a 9X9 Tic Tac Toe Board.

  • Vatsal Patel shared why he might want to direct his career towards product management. Considering that US provides 3 year extention for a STEM field student to stay in the country and apply for an H1B visa, one needs to find a job for sustaining themselves.

    • Even though someone might be willing to work in a given job role, they might not want to keep working in the same field.

    • Siddharth Bhatia shared a friend’s experience where they disliked their job as a product manager after being promoted.

    • One should try to explore multiple domains since a single domain might become monotonous.

  • We talked about games and the companies that built them.

    • Valve is one of the few gaming companies with a small team who controls a major chunk of the market.

    • Spiderman franchise games were initially built under Activision and Treyarch. It was later taken over by Insomniac games who also did a proper justice to the franchise.

    • Ubisoft had a game series for The Prince of Persia which was later discontinued and probably morphed into Assassin’s Creed franchise.

    • Vatsal Patel shared an example of Call of Duty: Vanguard, where an identified cheater won’t be able to attack opponents.

      • Some game services use fingerprinting and Anti-cheat engines to block a particular device permanently from joining an online game if found cheating.

  • Sanni Prasad talked about different ways in which he tried to use a PNG image in a Flutter application.

  • We discussed how Buy Now, Pay Later works.

    • Here’s an interesting Youtube Video explaining in and out of BNPL.

    • Jaden Furtado suggested that it works everywhere and it’s profitable.

    • Fingerprinting could be used by the applications to identify if the device or the user is suspicious and allow those who might have good credit score.

  • NASA cancelled the Artemis - 1 launch due to some technical issues and it was rescheduled for 9th September 2022.

    • Artemis - 1 plays a crucial role in revisiting the moon and setting up a base on it. It is also one of the first missions involving people from different races.

    • This launch embibes a similar kind of anticipation and energy that even SpaceX did during its Falcon Heavy launch.

    • We talked about how Apollo 11 launched to moon with a memory of mere 72Kb in its ROM.

  • Darshan Rander shared that his app MusiShare got published.

    • The app uses Jetpack compose. Also, Flutter bundles 3MB engine files which makes it relatively heavier in file size. XML would have consumed less memory but he didn’t use it since he wanted to try using Jetpack Compose.

    • He shared how he reverse engineered a music API by tracing the network requests.

  • Sanni Prasad shared an article about how one could Create widgets for Android homescreens in Flutter.

    • Widgets are supposed to be written for Native Android.

      • This can be done using the android folder in the project directory.

      • One can also create extra activities for native and trigger it using Flutter.

  • Jaden Furtado shared how one can use Wireshark VPN on phones and also capture the mobile traffic using ADB.

    • He also talked about how proxy chaining works and how one could do it. Proxy chaining involves forwarding traffic from one proxy server to another.

  • Pranav Dani talked about how Twitter is testing the edit feature for editing tweets.

    • It might be a paid subscription for Twitter Blue users.

    • On similar lines, we discussed how WhatsApp should add some features such as scheduling a message, but isn’t adding it since its userbase is huge and might not easily adapt to such changes.

  • Sanni Prasad shared his issue of date parsing in ISO8601 format in Go.

  • Hardik Raheja shared his experience of SIH at IIT Guwahati.

    • Their problem statement was regarding Offline payments in person.

    • UPI is only supported in India. Countries like US use wire transfer unlike India which uses RTGS, NEFT and UPI.

  • We talked about differences in Android and iOS implementations for capturing images in differnt apps.

  • We talked about how mobile carriers in US like AT&T provide a free iPhone as part of their scheme.

    • Some people get into such schemes since they want to use the latest devices, but the scheme comes with some obdurate terms and conditions.

  • Poonam Jha talked about her requirements for getting a new compact sized phone.

    • We discussed how multiple phone brands evolved in India.

    • She also talked about pay in MAANG companines and Startups. A Startup’s monetization depends on its predictions of sustainability.

  • We talked about how EVs will eventually capture the market and how some options from automakers such as Tesla have already make an impact.

    • In the current scenario, EVs typically cost a lot, mainly due to its expensive battery packs.

      • Tesla initially had a deal with Panasonic for building Battery packs. Batteries involve lot of production variables such as effieciency, materaial and heat dessipation.

    • One potential solution to charging stations for EVs could be standardisation of battery packs upon which different manufacturers could build their cars.

      • This introduces a new problem of differentiating a vehicle which could be solved by individual tuning of vehicles for each company.

  • We talked about evolution of technology and how different experiences shape a person and their thinking.

    • For instance, practical experiences such as using an old PC with a Floppy drive or CDs and restricted storage space and internet access might shape a person’s thinking and approach to using devices in a different way as compared to someone who has a constant internet access and an uncustomizable device.

    • CD burning used to be a common chore for people who used to download music and movies from the internet.

      • This chore was eventually replaced by streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix. Yet some people still prefer to keep local files for music.

    • We also talked about evolution of internet access in India, where 3G plans were extremely expensive initially.

    • Darshan Rander shared that Winamp will be revamped. Winamp was a popular music player in the 90s and 2000s.

    • Vatsal Patel and Pranav Dani talked about old games such as Dangerous Dave, Banania and Road Rash which were built for devices with low specifications.

  • Vatsal Patel shared how this perspective of backtracking every tech related problem has helped him at his job, quite a few times.

  • Darshan Rander and Aryan Nayak talked about how Dall-E works with concept of stable diffusion. An article on the Working of Dall-E.

  • Aryan Nayak talked about his current work at Amazon UK related to Elastic Search under the Search Team.

    • Open Search is one of the examples that is built over Elastic Search.

    • Amazon built its own version of Elastic Search after version 7.1 since it was privatized after that.

  • We talked about the Interview process and strategies for multiple companies and how the candidate drives an interview based on their answers.

    • LeetCode is one of the most helpful platforms for preparation.

      • Competitive coding should be approached in study and then solve fashion since it helps in grasping the problem better.

      • Concistency matters more over a longer period of time.

    • Company hiring is generally based on logic and thinking capability.

      • Although, a person who knows the system might still be able to solve the issues quickly. So we discussed how practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge are both necessary in understanding and working with a system efficiently.

  • Aryan Nayak shared his experience of working at Amazon UK and the cultural shocks that one should expect when travelling to different countries for work.

Projects Showcased

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #94

Date: 27-08-2022

Duration: 4 hrs 10 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Rishit Dagli shared how he got the domain for his newseletter.

  • Saifuddin Saifee shared that his team won SIH (Smart India Hackathon).

  • Jaden Furtado shared that his team CodeXplorers won the SIH (Smart India Hackathon).

    • His problem statement was about implementing Offline Digital Payments.

    • The frontend for their application was built using React Native and it also involved some use of Wifi Direct.

    • He talked about the general prcoess of project selection in the college. Most colleges internally segregate teams for SIH applications based on the likelihood of the project being successful.

  • Dhiraj Chauhan shared his experience of completing his MLH Fellowship for the summer batch. The MLH Fellowship is a 12-week internship alternative for aspiring software engineers.

  • Rishit Dagli showcased a quick innocuous exploit on the KubeCon website, where he was able to access his talk details even before the official annoucement was made.

  • Sarah Khan and Himanshu Sharma discussed about how one can get into Open Source contributions.

    • Improve a software that you already use.

  • Rishit Dagli talked about Kubernetes and how it can be helpful for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

  • Pranav Dani talked about how multiple instances of Google meet on mobile devices leads to confusion. Google also provides Meet option in the Gmail app and Duo as a separate app which adds to the confusion.

  • We talked about how Google Drive scans all the files in the drive which some might consider to be a privacy issue. This is more into automated scanning though to find abuse of usage, not people reading your files. One way to avoid the issue of scanning sensitive data could be to encrypt the files before uploading them to the drive.

  • Dhiraj Chauhan talked about his ideas for the community programs that he wanted to conduct in his community.

    • Darshan Rander and Rishit Dagli suggested some ideas for smooth functioning of the program such as:

      • Limiting applicant acceptance to few people to maintain the quality of program.

      • Creating a discord bot for the channel to address common issues and posting important announcements.

      • Mentorship program for community members.

  • Darshan Rander shared his experience of attending Flutter Pune meetup. More working class people attended this meetup which adds more value for the younger audience.

  • Dhiraj Chauhan shared his mid-term blog for his GSoC program at 52°North.

  • We talked about portfolio websites and how minimal design choices might prove more appealing to a larger audience.

    • Dhiraj Chauhan shared how he checks the performance tab in the devtools to check the loading time of a website. We also talked about Lighthouse which is a Chrome extension that helps in evaluating the performance of a website.

  • Darshan Rander shared that most domains ending with ml, fr or tk are easily flagged as malicious, hence one should avoid using such domains for extremely important purposes.

  • Heroku is soon going to end its free tier plan for all its users.

  • We talked about Reddit, Twitter and Linkedin and how it might be a bit overwhelming for some people to use them; since many people post a lot of content which might lead to comparison and unwanted demoralization.

  • Dhiraj Chauhan and Pranav Dani talked about how one might want to approach making a project.

    • Learning about the basics of a library or a language by watching a crash course and then refering to the documentation as and when needed.

  • Sahil Prasad shared an article about a teenager who tracks jets of multiple people using the Open Sourced data about flights.

  • Sahil Prasad shared that his first PR was merged.

Projects Showcased

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #93

Date: 20-08-2022

Duration: 5 hrs 20 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General Introductions.

  • Ronit Malhotra shared that he started with Web Development recently with the help of a YouTube Channel called Programming with Mosh.

  • We talked about how communication gap between interdependent teams working on a project can lead to bugs, delays in delivery/deployment and might also lead to unnecessary tension amongst the members of the team. Differences in the tactics of communicating problem across teams should follow a structured approach to avoid confusion.

    • Himanshu Sharma shared his work experience that he was fixing issues that were not in accordance with his job description.

    • Tushar Nankani talked about issues that could affect the flow a project.

      • Lack of accountability and sense of responsibility among multiple teams and its members causes communication issues.

    • Jai Dewani suggested that sharing phone numbers to higher authorities could enervate one’s time since they might call at odd times.

  • Jai Dewani talked about a book Holub on Patterns that he read recently. This is a book about programming in an object -oriented way and about how to use design patterns to solve commonplace problems in object-oriented systems.

    • He also talked about the Game of Life, a game that he built using Java while following the book.

  • Rishit Dagli shared that he recently became a member of the Kubernetes organisation.

  • Jaden Furtado shared his Medium article about the vulnerability that he found in Townscript’s website. Nullcon is Asia’s largest international security conference.

  • Ishwar Gowda shared how he wrote a Compiler Jack using logic gates by following a book called The Elements of Computing Systems.

  • Dheeraj Lalwani asked for resources regarding realtime collaborative software that make use of operational transform.

  • Dheeraj Lalwani suggested some improvements such as editable titles and variable font weight in HackerResume, a project that Ishan Sharma helped building at Hackerrank.

  • We talked about community events and the discussions that were recently took place in Bangalore.

  • Pranav Dani talked about Android 13 Tiramisu and the changes that it brings over Android 12L.

  • We talked about multiple tools like Obsidian and Notion that one might use to record any information that they came across.

    • We also talked about the concept of a Second Brain by leveraging the note-taking tools.

  • Gitpod will soon support android development through an emulator online.

  • Ishan Sharma shared how he encountered the idea of working on HackerResume.

    • A standardised resumé might help recruiters in segregating the required candidates.

      • Overleaf provides a good template for a resumé but the only limitation is that it’s not beginner friendly.

    • He shared how HackerResume was migrated from Firebase to PostgreSQL.

  • HackerResume generates a PDF in the backend and then sends it to the frontend on every save since generating PDF on frontend might be resource heavy for some low powered devices.

  • Rishit Dagli shared his experience of becoming a GitHub campus expert at the GitHub Field Day, where he had his in person on boarding.

  • Ishan Sharma shared his talk about Web Animations.

  • Rishit Dagli shared his talk about WebAssembly.

  • Ishan Sharma shared his idea of using WebAssembly to run code on client machine, during an internal hackathon at HackerRank. This idea could potentially reduce server costs since it won’t spin up a new instance when a code is executed.

  • Krishna Gadia talked about his experience as a product manager at gupshup.

    • He also talked about gupshup as a product.

Projects Showcased

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #92

Date: 13-08-2022

Duration: 7 hrs 20 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Ramyak Mehra shared that he is a part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2022.

  • We talked about BitTorrent parser and ways in which it could be built.

  • Aditya Oberai shared his article How Can DevRel Enable Engineering?.

    • He also shared that he will discuss about serverless tech in a talk. (Event link)

    • We discussed some features of .NET MAUI, the successor of Xamarin.

  • We talked about Expo, a React Native library which allows updates to apps using it without requiring app stores.

    • Flutter had a similar feature, but it was dropped since it was difficult to maintain. (GitHub issue)

  • Darshan Rander talked about his dilemma of applying to companies off campus. In this case, one might not be able to gauge the work culture and if they will like working there.

    • Aditya Oberai suggested applying for internships or working on a contractual basis. Starting part time and then converting it into a full time opportunity can help in gauging the work culture.

  • We talked about the learning curve of a Developer in a company and how can one recognize where the curve gets flat.

    • When things start getting repetitive and redundant, that’s when the learning curve gets flat.

  • Aditya Oberai talked about how a mock design helps in clearly visualising a project and also increases efficiency.

  • Ayush Chauhan talked about how Tornado Cash was used for money laundering.

  • VLC Media Player is now banned in India.

    • India is banning services without proper justification which is inconvenient for many people.

  • Sreekaran Srinath talked about the differences in Indian OTT plans which can be purchased using VPN and used in other countries with similar content offerings at an ostensibly cheaper rate.

    • We discussed the Purchase Power Parity and how it affects the prices of OTT service plans and online courses.

  • Harsh Kapadia suggested Namaste JavaScript as a good resource for understanding JavaScript fundamentals.

  • Aditya Oberai shared Arpit Bhayani’s channel for learning about back end technologies.

  • Aditya Oberai and Harsh Kapadia talked about Dev Advocacy and how it affects taking decisions.

  • We talked about internships and how one can get them.

  • Harsh Kapadia asked whether jobs that involve a lot of innovation (like research positions) face massive layoffs before/during an economic recession.

    • It depends on the industry, company and how integral research is for the company.

      • A company whose core is research, will not let go of its core research department.

    • It also depends on the profitability of the company, the number of employees it has, its expenditure, funding, etc.

    • Thus, it is extremely important to do one’s due diligence before joining or applying to a company.

  • How does one research about a company?

    • Go through the company’s site to see what they do. Read blogs and articles to get a deeper understanding.

    • Go through employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor, Blind, etc.

    • Talk to ex-employees.

    • Ask the interviewer questions.

    • Get a legal overview of the offer letter and one should themselves read it thoroughly as well.

    • Look into the profitability, funding and Burn Rate of the company.

    • One has to be as informed as possible, because a complete assurance is not possible. It is a leap of faith to join a company, so one can only control what is in their hands, that is to be as informed as possible.

  • How should choose between a MNC corporate job vs a job at a startup?

    • This is a debate between risk and growth.

    • It mainly depends on one’s risk-taking capacity.

    • It is easier to experiment without repercussions at an earlier stage in one’s career and coming from a privileged background also helps.

    • Ideally one should look to maximize growth at earlier stages in their career.

  • How can one figure out whether they will grow at an organisation?

    • Check whether their product and audience is growing.

    • Joining in at a point at which the company or product is pivoting to a new direction is good, as a lot of changes take place, which teaches one a lot.

    • It is good if a company or product has started to scale up, because scaling up bring its own interesting problems.

    • Although it is good if the company has a lot of problems to solve as that implies a lot of growth, but the company’s stability has to be taken into account as well to ensure a certain level of job security. So, a balance between problems and company stability also has to be looked at.

      • This balance can be tipped on either side depending on one’s risk-taking capacity, career stage and monetary background.

  • Ayush Chauhan talked about Superteam DAO.

  • Darshan Rander shared a Tweet thread How do I add Material 3 custom colors and harmonize them in Flutter?.

Projects Showcased

  • Darshan Rander showcased the MVP of MusiShare, his Jetpack Compose Android app to solve the problem of sharing music between multiple music streaming platforms.

    • From the link of a song from a particular music-streaming service, the app can open the same song on another music-streaming service installed on the user’s phone.

    • Aditya Oberai suggested checking Shazam since it provides a similar service.

Meet Screenshot

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OTC CatchUp #91

Date: 06-08-2022

Duration: 4 hrs 30 mins

Topics Discussed