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!
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
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We talked about VLSI (Very-Large Scale Integration) technology and touched upon its front-end and back-end processes.
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Harsh Kapadia talked about the 3D V-Cache being below the core (compute) die in the new AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D desktop processors.
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AMD Responds to Intel: Ryzen 7 9800X3D Price, Specs, & Major Changes
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Cache Goes on Top, or Cache Goes on Bottom? The X3D Dilemma
-
Very interesting video talking about the power, latency, memory stacking, physical design, packaging and thermal complexity tradeoffs that have to be taken into consideration while deciding whether the core (compute) die goes above the 3D cache die or vice versa.
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Harsh Kapadia shared Qualcomm’s v8 License, Cancelled by Arm!
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Alpesh Bhagwatkar shared
-
Russian Court Slaps Google With a $20 Decillion Fine: Here’s Why.
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Indonesia Bans Sales Of Google Pixel Phones
-
We also talked about Make in India, made in the USA, tariffs and taxes.
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-
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Gajraj Singh asked for laptop recommendations. We looked at a few gaming laptops from Lenovo and Dell.
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Pranav Dani shared VIM Adventures, an online game based on Vim's keyboard shortcuts (commands, motions and operators).
OTC CatchUp #204
Date: 05-10-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 53 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Siddharth Bhatia told us that he is organising the second Kurzgesagt Meetup Mumbai 2024 on the 19th of October, 2024! Do register and join in!
-
Siddharth Bhatia told us about Dev Dinner in Mumbai, India, an in-person hangout for anyone interested in Tech.
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Harsh Kapadia shared
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His talk on the Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) file on Linux.
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Asciidoctor Jet, an Asciidoctor template that Harsh made, which among other sites, the CatchUp summary site (the current page) also uses.
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The
robots.txt
file of Harsh’s portfolio site.-
More information: robotstxt.org
-
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Mohit Gangwani shared
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Mohit told us that he was using Laravel to build a web app to explore different technologies.
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We unsuccessfully tried to figure out why Void Linux, a Linux distro built from the ground up without depending on any other distro, was required in the first place. We couldn’t find features that made a huge difference from the existing ones.
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Siddharth Bhatia shared the OTC CatchUp #198 summary in podcast format using NotebookLM.
-
Siddharth discovered it through Andrej Karpathy’s Tweet that used NotebookLM.
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We discussed about how meetups, talks and podcasts are more about awareness of things going on in the industry rather than learning, because learning happens when we do stuff ourselves in opposition to just listening to people who’ve worked with it before.
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Siddharth Bhatia told us how some companies create some products and/or features to attract users to their products, so that people can discover all the practically useful and cool features that their products have. He gave us an example of Obsidian, a note-taking application, that incorporated a graph feature that shows a network/graph of how all notes in the app are related. Siddharth said that he does not think that the feature has a lot of practical uses, but he and many others were attracted to Obsidian because of that feature and then fell in love with all the other cool features that Obsidian has to offer.
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Alpesh Bhagwatkar shared Obsidian, Taming a Collective Consciousness.
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Rishit Dagli gave us some AI updates, told us about his Math courses and shared some of his experience interning with Qualqomm's AI research department.
-
He talked about the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno algorithm.
-
He shared Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection
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He also shared some of Qualcomm’s public AI datasets.
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Projects Showcased
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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.
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Technologies used: AWS (EKS, EC2, Route 53, IAM and more), Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD
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Project repository: github.com/KMK-Git/eks-argocd-starter
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Blog explainer: Amazon EKS ArgoCD boilerplate
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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
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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.
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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.
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-
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.
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We talked about resolving infrastructure issues like intermittent network losses, connection dropping issues, etc.
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Telnet, Netcat, etc.
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-
Harsh shared How NAT traversal works.
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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
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Along with Rishit Dagli, we also touched upon interviews, job availabilities, etc.
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OTC CatchUp #202
Date: 21-09-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 56 mins
Topics Discusssed
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We talked about new lines and line endings in different machines.
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We watched a video with CR and LF keys on a Teletype Model 33 ASR.
-
Just like the carriage return word is an artefact from the Teletype models, the bell (as heard in the video above) is also an artefact from Teletypes. It can be heard on the Windows Command Prompt (cmd) by executing
echo \a
orecho \07
.
-
-
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We talked about Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA), Competitive Programming and languages for solving DSA questions.
-
Bython - Python with braces
-
To resolve issues with not being able to translate understood concepts to code, the advice given was to understand the concept, write pseudo-code on paper and then try to code it. Essentially, the more one codes, the easier it becomes, so another advice was to code a lot.
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Kartik Soneji suggested Grokking Algorithms.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia asked for help with trying to figure out how Machine Code translates to Assembly when
objdump
is used to disassemble an executable.-
We were able to partially understand the translation using the Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer Manuals.
-
We also looked at ref.x86asm.net and Decoding Machine Code without much success.
-
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Harsh Kapadia shared
-
-
This was regarding Microsoft wanting to lock down the Windows kernel from kernel-level drivers for anti-cheat, anti-virus and other purposes, in response to the Crowdstrike incident.
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OpenAI’s new "deep-thinking" o1 model crushes coding benchmarks
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Rishit Dagli shared and talked about
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The importance of the discovery of Fast Fourier Transforms, as it led to wars ending and nuclear testing getting restricted.
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The fact that what we consider an image is actually the impulse response of an image.
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We talked about AGI and Superintelligence.
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Rishit thinks that AGI will be achieved in his lifetime, but is decades away from being a reality. He also thinks that machines becoming smarter than humans is inevitable.
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Biocomputers made of human brain neuron cells are up for rent
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Pranil Chitre told us how he is liking the work he is doing at his Flutter internship and how he is liking the company’s work culture.
-
We watched a few funny videos
OTC CatchUp #201
Date: 14-09-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 41 mins
Topics Discusssed
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General Introductions
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After Jia Harisinghani showcased her course project on Data Structure Animation, a few others shared some visualizers.
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Harsh Kapadia shared Quick Sort Visualizer and AVL Tree Visualizer.
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Bhavesh Kukreja shared some links to GNU Busybox printf.c, Tearing apart printf().
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Rishit Dagli talked about how real-time rendering is not that computationally expensive after Jaden Furtado showcased his project updates.
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Atharva discussed some projects he has worked on, which are also highlighted in his portfolio.
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His movie streaming project uses a third party API to fetch movie data.
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Jaden Furtado posed a question: Is success a result of hard work or luck?
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Harsh Kapadia mentioned that luck is temporary, but hard work makes success last.
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Rishit Dagli suggested that we could explore this philosophical concept and create an experiment to verify it.
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vintus vinifera shared a problem statement about converting floor plans to 3D models using Blender for SIH 2024.
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Harsh Kapadia showcased an example about string literals.
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He defined two functions: one that returns a string literal and another that returns an array of characters (returns starting address of the array).
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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.
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Jaden Furtado and Atharva discussed penetration testing techniques.
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Rishit Dagli shared a problem he was facing with SSH access into a Slurm job.
Projects Showcased
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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.
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Jaden Furtado showcased updates to his project built using Vessel.js, which simulates all the components and systems of a ship.
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He added middleware to handle requests and responses using Flask and WebSockets, based on the IEC 61131 standard.
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Atharva showcased his movie streaming project, Orion View.
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It is built using MERN and vercel.
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OTC CatchUp #200
Date: 07-09-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 30 mins
Topics Discusssed
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We completed 200 CatchUp sessions! We’re all so happy and proud!
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We talked about programming languages like C, Go and Rust, mainly discussing the syntax, baked-in native functions and private variable access.
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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.
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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
andNone
keywords. -
Jaden Furtado shared C skill issue; how the White House is wrong.
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Alpesh Bhagwatkar asked for Partition Manager recommendations and Siddharth Bhatia recommended EaseUS’s free partition manager.
OTC CatchUp #198
Date: 24-08-2024
Duration: 4 hrs 28 mins
Topics Discussed
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Aniket Kadam told us about his struggles with Autism and how he is trying to develop products for Neurodivergent people.
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Aniket told us about the challenges he faced with microcontrollers while developing products because they have very little RAM. The RAM is so less, that the microcontroller could not even verify the SSL certificate for a HTTP request. Also, if he asks for data exceeding the amount of RAM available on the device, it will crash and reboot.
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Harsh Kapadia shared a few content creators that he watches to learn more about Neurodivergence and some disabilities.
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Tushar Shelke asked us how fast C++ is and which applications use it. C++ is fast and reliable-enough to be used in stock market trading applications and in Operating Systems (like Windows) to name a few places that use it extensively.
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Tushar Shelke also asked what 'native' means in terms of compilation.
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Aniket Kadam and Nida Shaikh talked about using Lua for scripting and Siddharth Bhatia shared LuaRT, a Windows programming framework for Lua.
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Harsh Kapadia shared github.com/jasonmayes/Real-Time-Person-Removal.
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Games
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We praised indie games like Stardew Valley.
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Siddharth Bhatia shared How Earthbound Became The Ultimate Cult Classic.
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We talked about copyright and fair-use when someone talked about companies being able to scrape any content of the web to train LLMs.
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We mentioned that licensed content cannot be used for training unless the license permits it or if the trainer has obtained legal permission to use that licensed content.
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Siddharth Bhatia shared OpenAI says New York Times lawsuit "without merit," claims training AI models with public media is "fair use".
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Harsh Kapadia was of the opinion that YouTube hasn’t solved the copyright problem, but they’ve done a lot of good stuff. A lot of copyright companies abuse YouTube’s copyright system. It’s very difficult for YouTubers to counter copyright claims by companies and claim fair-use.
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Siddharth shared YouTube’s copyright system isn’t broken. The world’s is.
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Viranchee Lotia shared Intro to Large Language Models.
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We talked about Commodore 64, Disk Operating System (DOS), Hercules CRT, Sinclair Computers and more.
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We were surprised to learn that the hardware company ARM is actually an abbreviation for Advanced RISC Machines!
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Siddharth Bhatia told us how XBMC was renamed to Kodi.
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We talked a little about the history of AT&T.
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Siddharth Bhatia took us through the first two editions of The MagPi, the RaspberryPi magazine.
Projects Showcased
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Siddharth Bhatia shared Amber2, a custom theme for Windows Terminal. This is a sequel to his Amber-theme project.
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Rishit Dagli shared his project NeRF-US, which removes Ultrasound Imaging artifacts from Neural Radiance Fields in the wild.
OTC CatchUp #197
Date: 17-08-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 41 mins
Topics Discussed
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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 entering0.0.0.0:8000
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.
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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.
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How much money is required?
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Unfortunately tons. Provisions for around a Crore should be made.
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If they’re taking loans, people usually take ~Rs. 50 Lakh as an education loan.
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How important is one’s CGPA?
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Extremely important, especially if one is going to pursue higher education directly after college.
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Which countries require the GRE?
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A lot of them.
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On an average, it takes about three to four months to prepare.
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Why is USA so popular? What about Germany and Ireland?
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USA has some of the world’s best universities and a lot of well-paying jobs.
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The main issue with Germany is the language barrier.
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How much do research papers matter?
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A lot, but only good and proper ones. Papers written for the heck of it don’t matter.
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Can one skip Leetcode if they’re pursuing a Master’s degree?
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Definitely not. All interviews unfortunately include Leetcode-type questions.
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Cybersecurity
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Jaden Furtado told us about DoublePulsar.
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Jaden also talked about Command and Control (C2/C&C) Servers.
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CPU pipeline
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We discussed the differnces between RISC and CISC architectures.
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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.
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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.
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Pranav Dani shared an online simulator for RISC-V to explain the pipeline stages.
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We talked about branch prediction and how one would go about implementing it in a pipeline.
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Show and Tell
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Pranav Dani showcased his RISC-V project where he built a 5+ stage pipeline in Verilog.
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He executed a few programs compiled for RISC-V on his verilog pipeline.
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The processor in its current form talks directly with the memory over AXI4 protocol, but he plans to add a cache in the future.
-
OTC CatchUp #196
Date: 10-08-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 33 mins
Topics Discussed
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Anas Khan talked about his project which is like IMDB but for Youtube.
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Darshan Rander shared that he recently gave a flutter talk in Pune and liked it because people paid attention.
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He also shared a link to his blog post on animating canvas in Flutter.
-
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We discussed why people choose where to work in Bangalore or Mumbai, and why. The general consensus was money.
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Google was declared monopolistic and turns out more companies are under supervision for similar reasons.
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This could have big implications on how Google operates in the future. Each product might have to be spun off into a separate divison.
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Parth Puranik suggested that Perplexity could be a good alternative to Google Search due to its unique approach to search.
-
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We talked about Intel comments on the 13th and 14th generation K-SKU processor instability issue.
-
Gamer’s Nexus video about Intel.
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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.
-
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Aditya Oberai shared his experience of studying in a boarding school.
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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.
-
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Alpesh Bhagwatkar shared his in progress portfolio website and asked for feedback.
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He was facing issues with custom fonts in his portfolio.
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Darshan Rander suggested him to make it stable for desktop first and then move to mobile.
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jaden furtado shared the initial draft of his talk on cyber threats to satellites.
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He talked about how satellites are vulnerable to cyber attacks and how they can be protected.
-
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
-
We were surprised to find out that AWS has their own Top-Level Domain (TLD),
.aws
, when Chirag Nayyar shared -
Chirag Nayyar told us how the stock price of AWS went down a bit because of them not handling the announcement of deprecating seven services clearly.
-
-
C
-
Graphics
-
Siddharth Bhatia took us on a historical ride around the graphics town in C-land.
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Siddharth shared his blog Everything About BGI.
-
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Turbo C
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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 andlong
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.
-
-
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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
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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.
-
OTC CatchUp #194
Date: 27-07-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 49 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Swapnil Borkar talked about how he feels that most people now a days don’t want to talk about work outside work.
-
Abhinav Singh asked how projects are planned and released.
-
Everyone said how they do it in their organizations, mostly requirements come from business or user feedback but it varies a lot on company size.
-
-
We talked about TUI (Terminal UI) and how graphic protocols has evolved over time.
-
Ramyak Mehra shared ratatui a package he used to make TUIs.
-
-
Siddharth Kaduskar talked about Fully Convolutional Network while sharing it’s research paper - Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation.
-
He also talked about how TableNet works and detects tables and extract information.
-
-
Darshan Rander talked about how he has setup his email forwarding service and what issues he faced while doing that such as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
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.
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 shared useful contacts and resources, including a link to Brendan Gregg’s website.
-
-
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.
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #190
Date: 29-06-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 53 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Kartik Soneji talked about Rust and Disel. He also discussed NFTs and web3 since he is working with a company that is building a Web3-based marketplace.
-
Harsh Kapadia showcased his banana pie tool that he bought for a project.
-
Pranav Dani and Harsh Kapadia talked a bit about RISCV, its architecture and instructions.
-
-
The following links were shared in the meet:
-
Jaden Furtado showcased a website for malware detection where people could upload their files to check for malware traces.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a case where one of the students from his college was scammed by a fake interviewer and made them run malicious code on their computer and copied their RSA keys.
-
Jaden Furtado talked about how a train received a software update over the internet and sadly the software is exposed publicly on the internet.
-
We discussed the security implications of this and how it could be exploited.
-
-
Aniket Kadam shared his experience of hiring interns and applying for jobs and how very small changes in the resume can be misinterpreted by the interviewer.
-
Sreekaran Srinath shared his experience of working at Boeing.
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #189
Date: 22-06-2024
Duration: 4 hrs 12 mins
Topics Discussed
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We had a detailed discussion about AI, AGI and SSI.
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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.
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We had an interesting discussion about realism and how AI can replicate most of the already-produced art.
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Building on the previous discussion, we tapped into the philosophical topic of what work is derivative and what is original.
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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.
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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.
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He also shared a blog post where he wrote about a part of this topic.
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We talked about Windows Copilot+ PCs and the Recall feature and how it was ironically recalled.
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Darshan shared that he is currently working on the front-end side of different products in his company.
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jaden furtado talked about reverse shell and his cultural shocks in Singapore.
OTC CatchUp #188
Date: 15-06-2024
Duration: 4 hrs 41 mins
Topics Discussed
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Harsh Kapadia showcased his banana pie tool that he bought for a project.
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Pranav Prasanna Dani and Harsh Kapadia talked a bit about RISCV, its architecture and instructions.
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The following links were shared in the meet:
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Himanshu Sharma and KrIshan Sharmaa Dave discussed React Native.
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Himanshu Sharma is working on a project where he is migrating stuff to React Native.
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Ishan Sharma and Pranav Prasanna Dani pivoted the discussion towards Apple’s big announcements from WWDC, specifically entailing to "Apple Intelligence".
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Apple heavily integrated AI into their products, potentially killing the business of a few companies like Grammarly.
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We also talked about the design choices surrounding the Magic Mouse.
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Harsh Kapadia shared A nice implementation of SIMD.
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Pranav Prasanna Dani then talked about GPUs, SIMD, CUDA, and Vector and Scalar processing.
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We also touched upon the topic of F16 and F32, which are 16 and 32-bit floating point numbers respectively.
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We then talked about AMD’s MI300X and Nvidia’s counterp art.
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Harsh Kapadia, Aditya Oberai and Jay Kaku talked about Headless CMS and GitHub Copilot being used in companies.
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We talked about Copilot+ PCs introduced by Microsoft and the recall feature, which was ironically recalled due to some privacy and security concerns.
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Show and Tell
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Bhavesh Kukreja showcased a project where he wrote a C program to perform multiple operations on a BMP image.
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He used the Sobel operator to detect edges in the image.
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He also talked about the Canny edge detector.
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Harsh Kapadia showcased a program to parse elf for a program. The intention was to understand how the parsing works.
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Harsh KapadiaKapadia2/parse-elf[GitHub Repo^]
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OTC CatchUp #187
Date: 09-06-2024
Duration: 5 hrs 56 mins
Topics Discussed
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Anas Khan and Darshan Rander talked about how difficult it becomes for a developer to work on things with all the restrictions in a MNC.
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Alpesh Bhagwatkar talked about Cicada 3301 - a sequential puzzle posted by a user name "3301" on 4chan.
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Alpesh Bhagwatkar asked for suggestions on what field he should specialize in, to which Kartik Soneji said to focus on fundamentals instead of going into a niche.
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Pratik Thakare and Kartik Soneji talked about AWS RDS - AWS’s managed DB service.
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They also talked about managed and unmanaged DBs.
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Managed databases handle routine tasks automatically, while unmanaged databases require manual effort.
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Alpesh Bhagwatkar talked about a project in which he worked on built a IRS (Information Retrieval System).
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Kartik Soneji suggested he could have used Algolia or Elasticsearch.
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Darshan Rander and Pratik Thakare talked about Solid and Next, and how much they affect React.js development as a lot of people from these teams work on React.
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Darshan Rander and Pratik Thakare how common it is to find root access keys of any cloud service providers in frontend applications because of the blurred lines between the backend and frontend because of these frameworks.
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OTC CatchUp #186
Date: 01-06-2024
Duration: 2 hrs 45 mins
Topics Discussed
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Jaden Furtado asked for opinions about either he should pursue PhD of continue with his Job.
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General concenseus was to try to do both, if that’s not possible then choose PhD.
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Siddharth Bhatia talked about Google’s Search Algorithm Docs Leak.
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It was a big leak and later Google came forward and confirmed that the leaked documents were correct.
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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
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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.
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He had to put it on hold as the data required for him to add features was not available by the service.
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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.
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Siddharth Bhatia shared a video titled Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks where he talks about his opinions on why he felt so.
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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.
OTC CatchUp #185
Date: 25-05-2024
Duration: 2 hrs 20 mins
Topics Discussed
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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.
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OpenAI announced ChatGPT 4 and ChatGPT 4o just before the IO and took some light from Google IO.
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Pranav Dani talked about his project where he implemented async I/O in file system of xv6.
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Pranav Dani explained 5 Stage Pipeline of CPU that is -
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Fetch: Read instructions from memory.
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Decode: Decode instructions and access registers.
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Execute: Perform ALU operations.
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Memory Access: Load and store values between memory and registers.
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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
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Special thanks to Jaden Furtado for helping us host the CatchUp.
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Rishit Dagli and Jaden Furtado discussed how to write research papers.
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We also discussed the importance of proper citations.
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We compared industry white papers to academic papers; their differences and Rishit Dagli expressed his reasoning behind preference towards academia.
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Anil Harwani told Pranav Dani the reason why he should not jump into just any job and wait for the optimal job.
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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.
OTC CatchUp #183
Date: 11-05-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 23 mins
Topics Discussed
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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.
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We tested this on Airtel Broadband and were surprised to see that it worked.
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Swastik Baranwal shared about how someone used him to bag some sponsors on GitHub - post on X.
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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.
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Pratik Thakare, Kartik Soneji and Darshan Rander talked about HTMX and CSR vs SSR.
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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.
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In SSR your frontend is in your backend which causes issues in deciding what you should and should not send to user to process.
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In CSR you offload a lot of processing on client which further decreases your dependency on server.
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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
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Swapnil Borkar and Krishna Gadia talked about Why B2B brand building, marketing and sales is different from B2C.
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Harsh Kapadia shared
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Darshit Suratwala shared How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode.
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Jaden Furtado shared his excellent Nullcon Berlin 2024: Hacking Trains talk.
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Apple’s restrictions on external in-app purchase links.
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Harsh Kapadia talked about how he was surprised to learn that the
touch
command in Linux was actually meant to change the timestamp of a file rather than to create a file. -
Harsh Kapadia talked about Make.
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We talked about what Language Server Protocols (LSPs) are and the functionality that they provide.
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Harsh Kapadia shared his YouCompleteMe Vim plugin configuration where he integrated a Bash LSP.
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Formatting vs Linting vs Intellisense
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AI dump with Sreekaran Srinath's father, Darshit Suratwala, Saifuddin Saifee, Harsh Kapadia and more.
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We talked about how the internet is going to be flooded with no-value generic high-level blogs generated by LLMs to boost page rankings.
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AI hype
Projects Showcased
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Darshan Rander gave us updates on his app Heartry, which is an app for Writers that can also be used as a note-taker.
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Darshan told us how he enabled backups to Google Drive so that he doesn’t have to handle user’s data and have to work with privacy issues.
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He than showed us his Google Play Console dashboard to show us what metrics developers can check.
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He also told us about Google Play’s app delivery and installation time reduction optimizations.
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Darshit Suratwala told us about Langtrace, an open-source observability tool that collects and analyzes traces and metrics to help one improve one’s LLM apps, that he is helping build at work.
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Saifuddin Saifee showed us his project that won Mumbai Hacks 2024! It was a React.js based web app integrated with various LLMs, to complete various tasks like blog generation, quiz generation and more.
OTC CatchUp #181
Date: 27-04-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 40 mins
Topics Discussed
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Pranav Dani told us about his xv6 Operating System assignment, which is a re-implementation of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s Unix Version 6 (v6).
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We discussed what KVM and QEMU are, what their relationship is and whether they can be used independently.
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Mohit Gangwani told us about Function Pointers in C
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Mohit Gangwani shared nobuild, a library for writing build recipes in C.
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We had a revelation when we figured out that C supports variable arguments.
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Writing one’s own memory allocator function in C.
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Tsoding: Writing My Own Malloc in C
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Low Level Learning: i wrote my own memory allocator in C to prove a point
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The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)
Projects Showcased
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Preet Parekh showed us the upcoming second version of Devfolio's user profile page and took feedback from attendees to improve it.
OTC CatchUp #180
Date: 20-04-2024
Duration: 5 hrs 38 mins
Topics Discussed
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Dheeraj Lalwani told us the need for daily standup meetings at his workplace.
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Darshit Suratwala shared a project he is helping build at work, Langtrace, which is an open source observability software which lets one capture, debug and analyze traces and metrics from all applications that leverage LLM APIs, Vector Databases and LLM based frameworks.
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Harsh Kapadia shared
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He got to volunteer at a Austin Area RISC-V Group booth at Texas Linux Fest 2024!
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He got the chance to use the Commodore 64 and Amiga computers!
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Chirag Nayyar told us about Capital Expenditure (CapEx) vs Operating Expenses (OpEx).
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Darshan Rander talked about how he really enjoyed giving a Flutter animations talk at Peerlist’s first Tech Talks meetup!
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Rishit Dagli told us What are vectors and how do they apply to machine learning?
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Rishit Dagli told us about animated PDFs. We didn’t know that was a thing!
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Pratik Thakare talked about his operating system and environment.
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We talked about how it is really confusing for someone to figure out how to create a React.js project, because the official React.js docs suggest frameworks like Next.js and Remix instead of a way to bootstrap a React.js project like the now deprecated Create React App project did.
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We saw the video of a Cloudflare employee being laid off without being told why.
Projects Showcased
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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.
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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.
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Pratik Thakare told us how he is planning to build a server for a biometric attendance tracker to implement additional features.
OTC CatchUp #179
Date: 13-04-2024
Duration: 4 hrs 34 mins
Topics Discussed
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Pranav Dani talked about xv6 an operating system developed for teaching by MIT.
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He talking about its simple file system and is implementing small file optimization and truncate in the OS.
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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.
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Pranav Dani also talked about kernel types.
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We talked about the social life of people living in the US of the people in call.
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Some are struggling to have friends while some have a good amount of friends.
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Darshan Rander talked about Android Unknown Tracker alerts rollout to everyone a year later after announcing.
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It alerts you if anyone has put a tracker on you on your phone.
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OTC CatchUp #178
Date: 06-04-2024
Topics Discussed
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Recording Consent: A discussion unfolds around the ethical and legal considerations of recording calls without explicit consent from participants.
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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.
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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.
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There’s also a discussion on the value of education in Singapore versus the US, and considerations around pursuing higher education like PhDs.
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Future Plans and Aspirations: The conversation briefly touches on personal aspirations, future plans, and the desire for change or relocation for career growth.
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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.
OTC CatchUp #177
Date: 30-03-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 41 mins
Topics Discussed
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Harsh Kapadia and Ramyak Mehra discussed DMARC and SPF.
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Harsh Kapadia shared the following links:
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Mohit Gangwani shared a link to a project in Raylib.
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Rishit Dagli and Siddharth Bhatia talked about different rendering techniques.
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Rishit Dagli discussed 3DGS, implicit representation for 3D and differentiable rendering.
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On a GPU you can speed things up by rasterizing the image.
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Ramyak Mehra and Rishit Dagli talked about Voxels. Minecraft uses voxels.
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Voxels are a 3D representation of a pixel.
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Video: NVIDIA’s New AI: Video Game Graphics, Now 60x Smaller!
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Harsh Kapadia talked about the
malloc()
andfree()
functions in C.-
Hussain Nasser’s tweet: malloc() in C.
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Ramyak Mehra and Siddharth Bhatia talked about the Win32 API.
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This API is used for talking to the Windows operating system.
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We had a discussion about Backdoor found in xz liblzma.
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Harsh Kapadia talked about the Linux exploit.
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Rishit Dagli shared this image about LLM OS which has potential to hallucinate information.
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Researchers found an unfixable bug in Apple computers.
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This is an issue with the M1, M2 and M3 chips.
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Aditya Oberai and Siddharth Bhatia discussed Hackathons and communities and why Delhi seems to have more hackathons in general.
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He also talked about what’s wrong with the current hackathon culture. People are conducting hackathons for the sake of conducting hackathons.
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The following links were shared in the meet:
OTC CatchUp #176
Date: 23-03-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 12 mins
Topics Discussed
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Aniket Kadam joined in and talked about 100ms and its evolution as a platform including all the challenges they encountered.
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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.
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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.
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Darshan Rander and Aniket Kadam discussed ways in which they document they document their code base and present errors to their users.
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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.
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He also mentioned that you need to design around the documentation.
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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.
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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.
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Atharva Jadhav asked for advice on whether he should focus on AI/ML since his college curriculum is pushing him towards it.
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Most people suggested that he should choose what he likes based on exploration and not what the curriculum is pushing him toward.
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Siddharth talked about Excel Anonymizer, which is a tool that he built that anonymizes Excel files.
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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.
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He also talked about Busybox, which is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file.
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Pranav Dani talked about Caches and its levels l1, l2, l3.
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We also discussed victim cache and cache structure.
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Dram structure, its density and how the memory controller refreshes the contents of dram in an interval so that the banks don’t lose their charge.
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He also talked about the structure of sense amplifiers and how they are used to read the data from the dram cell.
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Harsh Kapadia shared an interesting article about CPU caches.
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Pranav Dani shared Cache Associativity Handout to understand the concept of cache associativity easily.
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Jaden furtado shared a book for Computer Organization and Architecture by William Stallings.
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Siddharth Kaduskar talked about Bunker, which is an OCR-based attendance tracker that extracts lectures from the class timetable uploaded by users.
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He also then talked about TableNet, which is a deep learning model for end-to-end table detection and tabular data extraction.
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OTC CatchUp #175
Date: 16-03-2024
Duration: 3 hrs 8 mins
Topics Discussed
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Kedar Karbele talked about his startup and the product he is building in the healthcare sector.
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He talked about all the compliances he has to understand while building the product.
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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.
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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.
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Darshan Rander talked about immich an Open-source Google Photos replacement.
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Kedar Karbele asked Rishit Dagli for guidance on how he should write research papers on AI and ML.
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Rishit Dagli said that he can get Grants from MacArthur Foundation.
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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.
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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
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General Introduction
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Bhavesh Kukreja talked about Scratch and a simple visual application that he built as a part of CS 50.
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Ramyak Mehra mentioned that he built his first app using App Inventor.
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Ramyak Mehra and Darshan Rander had a contention about a beginner using Rust or C for development.
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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.
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Ramyak Mehra mentioned that Rust gives warnings and directions to the developer while compiling whereas C doesn’t.
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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.
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Building on the previous discussion, Harsh Kapadia shared an example of structure packing and caching.
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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.
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Harsh Kapadia shared a few links:
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Anil Harwani and jaden furtado had a discussion about the paper: Creating Trust by Abolishing Hierarchies.
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Anil Harwani mentioned SNP (Secure Nested Paging) and how it’s a hardware feature that’s being used to secure the hypervisor.
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Pranav Dani and Anil Harwani talked about The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems.
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The paper talks about using message passing between cores and how it’s a better approach than shared memory/cache coherency.
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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.
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Rishit Dagli and Anil Harwani talked about formal verification and how it’s used to verify the correctness of a program.
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There’s nothing like fully secure programs and the best that we can do is to make it as secure as possible.
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Securing something should be less than 10% of the cost of the thing that’s being secured.
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Pranav Dani talked about Cache Hierarchy, set associative cache, and how it’s used to reduce the latency of memory access.
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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.
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He also talked about the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) and how it’s used to reduce the latency of page table access.
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We also talked about speculative execution, branch prediction and potential pitfalls.
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We discussed Linearizability, Sequential Consistency, and how they’re used to reason about concurrent programs.
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We also discussed how Serializability and sequential consistency are different. Some database terminologies are also used to reason about concurrent programs.
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OTC CatchUp #173
Date: 02-03-2024
Duration: 6 hrs 8 mins
Topics Discussed
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Darshan Rander talked about how he was incorporating OAuth and Google Drive backups into his mobile application Heartry.
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He shared Using Credentials between your Server and Google Services
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Harsh Kapadia shared the Pull Requests he opened on Darshan’s app to address bugs and suggest adding more features.
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Darshan Rander and Swapnil Borkar talked about how most mobile application playstores take a share of the revenue, have a review process before releasing an update to an app and an automatic staged user rollout feature.
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Swapnil Borkar shared his article User Testing to spot Insights & Inferences in Uber & Ola’s Design
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Harsh Kapadia shared Google says it’ll stop charging fees to transfer data out of Google Cloud and mentioned that he was surprised because all Cloud providers generally like to lock customers into their technologies and impose high migration fees so that they think twice before moving data out of their services.
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This might be due to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act as well.
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Rishit Dagli shared that some iPhone models have Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors to create a 3D map of one’s immediate surroundings. Some autonomous vehicles also use LiDAR to create a map of their surroundings.
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Harsh Kapadia shared a few videos recounting AMD's history.
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Viranchee Lotia shared his C++ learnings that he was learning from github.com/federico-busato/Modern-CPP-Programming.
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Jimmy Palathingal told us how C++ does not have in-built Garbage Collection, so we have to implement it ourselves.
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Rishit Dagli told us about various Mathematical terms while we were discussing Floating Point representation.
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Rishit Dagli and Viranchee Lotia told us about various floating-point formats like bfloat16 and the way they differ in the number of bits to represent a Floating Point number.
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CUDA vs ROCm: The Ongoing Battle for GPU Computing Supremacy
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Kartik Soneji talked about his Capture The Flag (CTF) experience.
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Whitespace (programming language)
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This programming language uses tabs, spaces and line feed (
\n
) characters to write programs.
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Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) is a disk encryption specification that mainly Linux distros support.
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Master Boot Record (MBR) vs Globally Unique Identifiers Partition Table (GPT)
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Viranchee Lotia shared azeria-labs.com, which apparently has execllent Shell reverse coding tutorials.
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Self-driving cars
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Harsh Kapadia shared Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.
OTC CatchUp #172
Date: 24-02-2024
Duration: 5 hrs 14 mins
Topics Discussed
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Siddharth Bhatia showcased a bunch of applications!
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He got Beta access to Project IDX, a web-based IDE by Google, like GitHub Codespaces and Gitpod. It is based on NixOS and has built-in iOS and Android emulators.
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He showcased Warp, a modern terminal that was previously only available in MacOS, but is now available for Linux as well.
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He also showcased Everything, a faster, better and more lightweight search solution for Windows, similar to ANGRYsearch for Linux.
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We talked about Google Stadia’s issues that led to its shutdown.
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Rishit Dagli told us about K3s, a lightweight K8s distribution built for IoT and Edge Computing and about MicroK8s, a fully compliant K8s distribution with a smaller CPU and memory footprint than most others.
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Akhil Sahu shared Open Props by Adam Argyle, which makes it easy and flexible to design components.
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Harsh Kapadia talked about the different package managers available on Fedora-based distributions like CentOS, RHEL, Rocky Linux, etc.
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DNF is the most modern package manager in the Fedora ecosystem and is pretty similar to APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) that is the package manager for Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu. It stands for Dandified Yum and is a rewrite of the Yum package manager.
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Yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is an older package manager that was a rewrite of YUP (Yellowdog UPdater), the package manager for Yellow Dog Linux.
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Both DNF and Yum work with RPM, the RedHat Package Manager.
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More details
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-
Mohit Gangwani talked about an issue that he was facing with Webpack not rendering certain Tailwind CSS classes in the production build, but was working fine in the development version, while building a web site for his friend.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared
-
Ishan Sharma shared Reducing Instagram’s basic video compute time by 94 percent
-
Anas Khan shared a project HackerRank + VS Code, which lets you solve HackerRank challenges in VS Code and Ishan Sharma informed Anas that they hired the developer to work for them at HackerRank.
-
The project is impressive, because the author spent hours reverse engineering HackerRank’s API calls and CSRF security measures, as is apparent from the project’s README file.
-
-
We talked about the differences between X11, Xorg and Wayland.
-
We talked about what Direct Memory Access (DMA) is and how it can be used to cheat in video games.
-
-
Pranav Dani shared that he has been using Verilog to build Code Fetchers.
-
He also shared ASIC World
-
-
Jay Kaku shared his solutions for HDLBits, a collection of small circuit design exercises for practicing digital hardware design using Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL).
-
-
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a simple CPU vs FPGA animation
-
Jay Kaku shared Introduction to FPGA
-
-
We looked up some binary data structures like the Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and Interrupt Vector Table (IVT or IDT) from volume two of the AMD64 Architecture Programmer’s Manual.
-
Along similar lines, Hardik Raheja told us about the issues he faced with DSDT and SSDT while installing Hackintosh.
-
We talked about prefetching (Locality of reference - spatial and temporal) and speculative execution in CPUs.
Projects Discussed
-
Siddharth Bhatia showcased his project Anonymize_Excel, a Python script that anonymizes an Excel file and synthesizes new data in its place.
-
It uses uses Microsoft Presidio together with Faker for anonymization purposes.
-
-
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #171
Date: 17-02-2024
Duration: 3 hrs
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Dheeraj Lalwani shared that he recently got a new job at HeyMarvin.
-
He also shared a link to the project that he was recently working on called Postpone.
-
-
AI/ML Roadmap asked by Harshit Malang.
-
We had a short discussion about Mumbai Tech Week conducted in Jio World convention.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a few links for some cloud platforms:
-
Darshit Suratwala and Harsh Kapadia had a chat about HashiCorp, its licensing changes and a discussion around the implications of these changes.
-
Harsh Kapadia referenced a few system design resources that he shared in one of the previous CatchUp sessions.
-
While sharing his project, Pranav Dani talked a bit about D3.js and difference between D3.js and Three.js.
-
Links to articles and YouTube channels:
-
-
Shubham Sah shared that he was a judge for a hackathon at Thakur College in Mumbai and since the theme was around AI, it was a bit difficult to differentiate between the functionalities of applications since most of the heavy lifting was done by the AI.
-
Ramyak Mehra talked about a talk on the topic "Why Rust isn’t the best choice for your next project" that he will be giving in Banglore in March.
-
He gave some insights and the ideology behind this talk since he has been working with Rust for a while now.
-
The discussion branched into his work at Dyte where he was working on the media pipeline.
-
He talked about SFU (Selective Forwarding Unit) and how it works.
-
A diagram that he shared.
-
-
Dheeraj Lalwani shared Video Streaming Server, a project that he worked on in college.
-
He has also added some good resources in the documentation.
-
-
We discussed muxing and de-muxing of media streams across different platforms like Zoom and Google Meet.
-
Some take up the approach of sending all the streams differently to all the participants while some take the approach of sending a single combined stream to all the participants.
-
-
Links related to the topic:
-
-
We had a good discussion about different video codecs and how some are good for storing while some are good for transmitting data.
-
We talked about Modern Image Formats: AVIF, WebP and Progressive vs Interlaced Video.
-
Kartik Soneji and Ramyak Mehra talked about mp4 compression, interlacing and some operations that can be performed on it.
-
-
Kartik Soneji and jaden furtado talked about a CTF (Capture The Flag) event that they participated in.
-
Ramdump, XSS, Binary exploitation, Padding Oracle Attack were some of the topics that were discussed.
-
-
Darshan Rander shared that he was exploring gRPC and how it can be used in a microservices architecture.
-
We then talked about ProtoBuf, HTTP/1, HTTP/2 and how gRPC can be used under the hood.
-
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.
-
Technologies used: React, D3.js.
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.
-
He was asked about what happens when one types 'google.com' in the browser.
-
Dheeraj’s college projects helped him a lot, as he was able to talk about technical experience and a variety of things like HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) that he was able to explore because of those projects.
-
-
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.).
-
OTC CatchUp #169
Date: 03-02-2024
Duration: 5 hrs 51 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Nice! 😉
-
Kartik Soneji talked about The 2024 MITRE Engenuity Embedded Capture the Flag Competition. He showed us his preliminary design to show us how people think while designing solutions that others will try to exploit.
-
Arryaan Jain talked about comparing audio codecs, earphone and headphone quality, and his disappointment with the lack of Dynamic Equalizers in mobile phones in the current market.
-
He talked about various types of headphone drivers and told us that earphones/headphones with hybrid drivers, especially those with one of the drivers being the Balanced Armature Coil Driver, sound really crisp and balanced.
-
-
Mobile processors
-
We talked about various mobile processor manufacturing companies like Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTek.
-
We talked about how Samsung ships their phones with different processors in different parts of the world, sometimes using Qualcomm (mainly for its flagship Galaxy S series) and at times MediaTek.
-
Anas Khan shared Samsung Galaxy S24 Series to feature AMD FSR for Enhanced Gaming Performance.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared Meet iPager - Help Apple #GetTheMessage.
-
-
Abhigyan Bafna shared his Artificial Intelligence and Data Science WhatsApp group where interesting discussions on AI take place.
-
We talked about htmx, a library that allows one to use HTML attributes to trigger requests and swap HTML responses in the DOM.
-
We talked about HTTP/3 and QUIC, and discussed how QUIC, which is based on UDP, still has reliability and streams built into it.
-
Kartik Soneji helped debug a Chrome Extension visibility issue that Kedar Karbele was facing. It turned out to be a CSS z-index issue.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a few resources for System Design.
-
Kartik Soneji shared an extremely important lesson with us: Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking
-
Saifuddin Saifee asked if it matters whether one uses DDR4 or DDR5 memory for normal development use cases and the general consensus was that it doesn’t matter.
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
-
OTC CatchUp #168
Date: 27-01-2024
Duration: 7 hrs 22 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Jaden Furtado told us about some of the security testing he has being doing on power plants.
-
He found a lot of very bad quality code.
-
He also found cases where systems with read-only permissions led to other systems being compromised due to exposed credentials in temporary directories.
-
-
Wilfred Almeida asked about anonymous e-mails and we came to a consensus that it would be very difficult to do that due to all major e-mail providers requiring DMARC, SPF, DKIM and e-mail reputation provisions.
-
Darshan Rander talked about Android disallowing users from accessing app data files through file managers.
-
It feels very restrictive, but has security benefits. The loss of freedom for users who cared is frustrating, because rather than having freedom to change and inspect things, they’re restricted like the iOS system.
-
It makes modifying apps by services like Revanced difficult as well, which is also a likely motivation for Google to go after removing access.
-
Clearing up confusion about how to access
/Android/data
and/Android/obb
folders in Android 13
-
-
Nishant Goel asked for advice to build a web site for a product that he was planning to build.
-
Ishan Sharma talked about how he was building a browser extension for HackerRank, learning Swift in his spare time to get into iOS development and building a project for experimenting with IoT devices.
-
We discussed our disdain over the 'Rent-to-Own' and 'You’ll Own Nothing' principles that companies have been pushing.
-
Rishit Dagli talked about his paper DiffuseRAW: End-to-End Generative RAW Image Processing for Low-Light Images
-
Siddharth Kaduskar discussed his decision of going for Masters.
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.
-
Anil Gohan added that documentation is meant for the correct audience that is reading it.
-
Pranav Dani shared a link to a book on Machine Code for Beginners.
-
-
-
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.
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.
-
-
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.
-
We talked about cloud gaming. Since it is device-independent, it can be played on any device including phones with a joystick.
-
Pranav Dani shared that he saw a laptop - Acer Predator Helios 300 - Spatial Lab edition - at B&H Photo Video which had a 3D screen that used eye-tracking to render the 3D effect.
-
Aditya Oberai played on Oculus (Now Meta) and felt dizzy after a while.
-
Apple Vision Pro is up for pre-order.
-
-
-
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #165
Date: 06-01-2024
Duration: 4 hrs 15 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Kartik Soneji talked about PostCSS and how it is not really needed with new features added to CSS.
-
Anas Khan talked about using Isolate for Sandbox for securely executing untrusted programs for his Leetcode clone project.
-
Isolate requires some setup and is written by International Olympiad in Informatics and used in Judge0.
-
-
Mohit Gangwani asked about process scheduling and Kartik Soneji explained the difference between scheduling for jobs and scheduling for interactive processes.
-
Linux uses Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS).
-
Anas Khan shared Brain Fuck Scheduler
-
-
Kartik Soneji discussed his Pull Request github.com/unkeyed/unkey/pull/474.
-
We discussed Carrier lock situation in US, wifi, ISP, data situation. Local data plans purchse and resale.
-
Mohit Gangwani asked about dual booting Linux vs using VMs and Kartik Soneji recommended Docker to him. Kartik also explained what Docker is.
-
Rishit Dagli shared his blog An Intuitive Look at the Dynamics of SGD.
-
We discussed how to choose which CPU to buy.
-
Threads and processes
OTC CatchUp #164
Date: 30-12-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 50 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Harsh Kapadia shared Most 16-year-olds don’t have servers in their rooms, which is a blog by a 16-year old who set up a Dell server, created and self-hosted a clone of Replit for his projects on the server, created and self-hosted a social media platform on the server with real users and a bunch of other projects.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a few videos from Gamers Nexus, a hardware review channel he really likes.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared What is the difference between clang (and LLVM) and gcc/g++?
-
Buffer Overflow, Segmentation Faults and Exceptions
-
Kartik Soneji explained what a Buffer Overflow is and why every Buffer Overflow does not cause a Segmentation Fault.
-
A Buffer Overflow is essentially writing more data into a buffer than it was allocated for, leading to over-writing the data after the buffer in the program’s memory.
-
A Segmentation Fault is an Exception generated when a program tries to access a memory address that is outside the memory segment (process address space) allocated to it by the Operating System or when it does not have the permission to access that particular memory location.
-
A Buffer Overflow writes data beyond a buffer’s allocated memory and this can cause a Segmentation Fault (Segfault) if the buffer is located near the end of the memory space allocated to the process and the overflow tries to write to an address beyond the address space allocated to the process.
-
-
More information and examples for Buffer Overflow and Segmentation Faults.
-
-
Aditya Oberai shared his blog Embracing Aloneness, which goes into the difference between 'aloneness' and 'loneliness', and talks about learning to enjoy 'me, myself and I'.
-
Endianness
-
Aditya Oberai told us how the terms 'little-endian' and 'big-endian' originated from the famous Gulliver’s Travels story. This has been coined and explained in the original 137th Internet Engineering Note (IEN 137).
-
We talked about how it is important to know a system’s Endianness, because answers can differ based on the byte storage order, especially with pointer truncation and bitwise operations.
-
-
Kartik Soneji shared Fast Inverse Square Root — A Quake III Algorithm and Ramyak Mehra shared The Truth about the Fast Inverse Square Root on the N64.
-
Kartik Soneji told us the story of creation of MariaDB by forking MySQL just before Oracle acquired it.
-
Kartik Soneji told us how the C programming language got a Boolean datatype and the story behind the need for
stdbool.h
.-
C did not have a Boolean datatype till the C99 standard. It was added in C99, but was named as
_Bool
instead of the standardbool
to not break millions of existing C programs, because a lot of C programs had already made custom definitions forbool
in their programs and so addingbool
as a datatype would break those#define
declarations. -
To make
bool
available for newer programs, a header filestdbool.h
was created, that essentially definedbool
and_Bool
and thus allowed newer programs to usebool
as a datatype.
-
OTC CatchUp #163
Date: 23-12-2023
Duration: 5 hrs 16 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Swapnil Borkar talked about how Germany and the US have the same work visa requirements but how German laws favour the employee.
-
Kartik Soneji talked about his Computer Network Design exam.
-
Subnetting
-
Supernetting
-
MAT
-
Google randomizing casing of DNS queries (DNS 0x20 Encoding)
-
-
Rishit Dagli shared his research paper DiffuseRAW: End-to-End Generative RAW Image Processing for Low-Light Images
-
Kartik Soneji shared
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #161
Date: 09-12-2023
Duration: 1 hr 40 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Chirag Nayyar told us that he has been gearing up to give four AWS and GCP certifications.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared videos on Google Gemini AI.
-
Chirag Nayyar and Ishan Sharma talked about the new AWS services and features announced at AWS re:Invent 2023.
-
Ishan was impressed by Amazon S3 Express One Zone Storage Class, which guarantees blazing object retrieval speeds, but Chirag said that it is too expensive.
-
Chirag was impressed by Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), which is an AWS service of Red Hat OpenShift, a platform powered by Kubernetes to build, modernize and deploy applications at scale.
-
Chirag added that Digital Native Businesses (DNBs) will use ROSA.
-
-
Chirag Nayyar and Ishan Sharma recommended reading ByteByteGo’s blog and watching ByteByteGo’s YouTube Videos as well.
-
Ishan particularly liked their blog on Why the Internet Is Both Robust and Fragile which talked about BGP being the cause of the 2021 Facebook outage and Harsh Kapadia shared articles on the 2021 Facebook outage.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a few miscellaneous videos.
-
Databases
-
Chirag Nayyar told us that he holds PostgreSQL in very high regards in terms of relational databases and would recommend people to use it.
-
He also mentioned how Oracle Database is an industry standard due to reliability and security layers albeit pretty costly.
-
Chirag shared Spanner, TrueTime and the CAP Theorem.
-
Projects Showcased
-
Darshan Soni and Om Pawaskar showcased a Java and MySQL employee management portal.
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #159
Date: 25-11-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 57 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Harsh Kapadia shared an Instagram Reel on how we need to use conformation bias to look at things positively rather than negatively.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) Parameters.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a list of the top 500 Supercomuters.
-
Mohit Gangwani talked about display panel technologies TN, IPS and VA.
-
We talked about Display Port vs HDMI.
-
DisplayPort Guide: What it is, its history and a comparison with HDMI
-
Mohit Gangwani shared Just bought a 240hz monitor. Why is 120hz the highest refresh rate?
-
Harsh Khatri added that Display Chaining can be done with Display Ports, but not with HDMI.
-
-
Industrial communication protocols
-
Jaden Furtado talked about how the Modbus protocol that is used for comunication between industrial electornic devices in industries like prower plants.
-
Modbus is also used to talk to Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), which are industrial computer control systems that continuously monitor the state of input devices and make decisions based upon a custom program to control the state of output devices.
-
-
He also introduced us to IEC 61850, which is an international standard defining communication protocols for intelligent electronic devices at electrical substations.
-
On being asked about the requirement of different protocols over the usual TCP/IP stack protocols, Jaden replied that these protocols all emerged very early on and the TCP/IP stack might not be the best for abolute real-time and time-critical systems.
-
-
Kartik Soneji talked about how helpful Text Fragments are, as they help with highlighting the most important parts of a web page.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared The high-stakes war on AdBlockers in reference to Google confirming that they will disable uBlock Origin in Chrome in 2024.
-
Harsh Kapadia mentioned that Wireguard can be used to create one’s own Virtual Private Network (VPN).
-
AMD Threadripper
-
Adventures at AMD: Origin of Threadripper (ft. Anil Harwani!)
-
New AMD Threadripper 7980X, 7970X, 7960X, & Threadripper Pro CPUs Announced
-
Crazy Efficient: AMD Threadripper 7980X & 7970X CPU Review & Benchmarks
-
AMD High End Desktop is back: 7980X & 7970X Threadripper Tested
-
AMD Threadripper Motherboards are Insane: TRX50 & WRX90 Board Round-Up
-
-
Kartik Soneji told us about OpenStack, a set of open source software components that provide common services for cloud infrastructure and about LocalStack, a service that allows local simulation, development and testing of Cloud services before actual infrastructure deployment on the Cloud.
-
We talked about Internationalis(z)ing Code.
-
Kartik Soneji told us Why You Can’t Name A File CON In Windows.
-
Kartik Soneji explained the differences and intricacies between Hard Links and Soft/Symbolic Links (Symlinks).
-
Kartik talked about how Symlinks can help with Semantically Versioned files, as a single file name can be used to refer to a constantly changing original file.
-
Symlinking also helps reduce the number of copies of a particular file, so it doesn’t have to be copied or maintained in every location if the file is changed.
-
Kartik told us to remember that symlinks can be an issue that cause run-time errors and missing dynamically-linked library errors, due to broken symlinks.
-
-
We all were surprised to learn from Kartik Soneji that the
touch
command in Linux that most people use to create a new file is actually used to change file access and modification timestamps to the current system timestamp!touch
just creates new file if the file didn’t already exist! -
We talked about Dithering and Anti-Aliasing.
-
Kartik Soneji poked fun at Harsh Kapadia for forgetting that a
NULL
character is represented by0x00
and not0x0A
(which represents a Line Feed character). -
We talked about CPU bound vs I/O bound tasks.
Projects Discussed
-
Harsh Kapadia shared his experimentation with Badger 2040, where he wrote small scripts to display profiles and marquee names across the screen.
OTC CatchUp #158
Date: 18-11-2023
Duration: 2 hrs 35 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Philip Durbin joined us and told us about the open source research data repository software, Dataverse, that he had been working on for the past 11 years.
-
He also runs Boston Open Dev, a monthly in-person meetup in Boston for people interested in technology!
-
-
Ishan Sharma and Philip Durbin told us about Steve Jobs' resignation from Apple and his subsequent ventures with NeXT and Pixar.
-
We talked about the OpenAI and Sam Altman drama.
-
Text messaging
-
Rich Communication Services (RCS)
-
Mohit Gangwani talked about how Sunbird / 'Nothing Chats' is Not Secure.
-
Philip Durbin informed us about Bump, a popular contact information sharing application back in the day.
-
-
Mohit Gangwani shared Downloading Images from Russian Satellite.
-
Security and privacy
-
Jaden Furtado shared his Cyber Security Medium blogs.
-
Tanay Kamath shared a thread on How to DELETE 99.9% of your digital footprint from the internet.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared his notes on Tor.
-
Philip Durbin talked about Quiet, a private, P2P alternative to Slack and Discord built on Tor & IPFS.
-
Jaden showcased Amass, an in-depth attack surface mapping and asset discovery tool that he used to find all the subdomains of Harsh’s domain harshkapadia.me.
-
-
Computer Networking
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about what Autonomous Systems (ASs) and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are, and how ASs peer with each other at IXPs.
-
Wilfred Almeida shared Nym, a service that claims to be superior to Tor and VPNs to protect communication patterns, IP addresses and metadata of users.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia shared Microsoft Reveals Custom 128-Core Arm Datacenter CPU, Massive Maia 100 GPU Designed for AI.
-
Aditya Oberai shared Hour of Code.
-
Aditya Oberai shared his talk Understanding Role-Based Access Control with ASP.NET Web APIs for .NET Conf 2023.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about Google confirming they will disable uBlock Origin in Chrome in 2024.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about DuckDuckGo’s new web browser.
-
We talked about how Google admitted to paying Apple 36% of Safari search revenue in exchange for default status on all of Apple’s devices.
-
Aditya Oberai and Ishan Sharma talked about how Epic Games created a Fortnite parody campaign video of Apple’s 1984 Macintosh commercial to protest against the monopolistic practices of Apple’s App Store.
OTC CatchUp #157
Date: 11-11-2023
Duration: 4 hrs 21 mins
Topics Discussed
-
We discussed the basics of Data Mining and Data Warehousing.
-
Mohit Gangwani asked for projects to build in the Networking domain.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a project on Socket Programming to measure the Throughput and Round Trip Time of a connection and suggested implementing it in C to get exposed to all the nitty-gritties of Networking.
-
Ramyak Mehra talked about using eBPF to build projects.
-
Ramyak also shared Implementing TCP in Rust.
-
-
Mohit Gangwani was talking about Win32 API and Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU).
-
Wilfred Almeida shared Breakpoint 2023: High performance computing for crypto
-
Anil Harwani talked about the importance of taking the time to plan one’s days, weeks, months and years.
-
Anil Harwani recommended watching
-
Harsh Kapadia shared The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about his in-person GitHub Universe 2023 experience.
-
Mohit Gangwani talked about display panel technologies TN, IPS and VA.
-
Darshan Rander talked about Windows Forms, which is a GUI library part of the .NET ecosystem to make applications for desktops, tablets and laptops.
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.
-
thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/ has some amazing visualaizations to under this algorithm.
-
-
Bhavesh Kukreja asked what does DevOps engineers do?
-
Aditya Oberai and Darshan Rander explained him that its something that comes between Development and Operations.
-
-
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.
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.
OTC CatchUp #154
Date: 21-10-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 5 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Rushil asked about how he can get internships.
-
Kartik Soneji suggested him to try sending cold emails.
-
-
People who sat for college placements tests of Barclays shared that they got rejection mails soon after they had submitted their tests.
-
Mohit Gangwani shared about NIC Bonding.
-
Darshan Rander shared "How Cloudflare mitigated yet another Okta compromise" by Cloudflare.
-
Darshan Rander shared about a new project he might work on syncing playlists among YTMusic and Spotify.
-
Darshan Rander talked MixT which is special designed for having consistency in distributed Databases.
-
Darshit Suratwala shared about a project he is currently working which would ease out deployment of Blockchains on Cloud platforms.
OTC CatchUp #153
Date: 14-10-2023
Duration: 2 hrs 58 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Pankaj Jaiswal talked about using RASA chatbots.
-
Pankaj shared his article on Why Rasa is the Superior Choice for Creating Custom Chatbots
-
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how he came to know that apart from Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision Language Models (VLMs) also exist and they combine visuals with some textual input to provide an output.
-
We talked about how a front end client app might slow down if a lot of API calls are made at the same time or if a lot of them are cascaded together.
-
It was suggested that APIs should return just the required amount of data, so that once the client scales, it doesn’t fetch more data than required.
-
-
In the same vein of talking about improving performance, we also had a discussion on efficient querying practices in SQL.
-
We discussed where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) lie in applications.
-
Harsh Kapadia explained that it is a middle layer (an interface) between the front end and the back end, but is implemented on the back end and consumed on the front end.
-
Darshan Rander rightly pointed out that it is incorrect to assume that APIs are always talked about in the context of the Web (as Harsh assumed). He said that every system has an API that some other system can use. For example, printing to the screen in C, Python or any other programming language calls internal APIs (functions) that in return make system calls/syscalls in Linux (which are exposed to the user as APIs) to actually print to the screen.
-
-
Assembly Language
-
Aditya Oberai talked about Appwrite's rebranding.
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.
-
Wilfred Almeida shared that he showcased a project, dropped NFTs.
-
Wilfred Almeida also shared that he got networking opportunities at the event.
-
-
Chirag Nayyar asked about DevFest event.
-
He also asked if anyone is contributing to Hacktoberfest.
-
-
Wilfred Almeida asked Chirag Nayyar how Google Cloud Platform is disregarded even though other cloud providers are providing same offerings.
-
Chirag Nayyar replied how Google Cloud Platform isn’t mature as Azure in terms of infrastructure.
-
Chirag Nayyar shared that Amazon Web Services is focused more on the infrastructure. He said that the number of EC2 instances has reached 30 billion in the past 30 years.
-
-
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
-
Ashfaq shared that he works in a startup, which is based on Micro SaaS.
-
-
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 shared about his work, he said that his company works on Micro SaaS which is built on Shopify.
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
OTC CatchUp #151
Date: 30-09-2023
Duration: 4 hrs 6 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a Digital Design & Computer Architecture course that Anil Harwani shared with him.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared his notes on how an Operating System boots.
-
Harsh Kapadia also shared Web in Native Assembly (Linux x86_64)
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how deleting a single character involves three characters (
\b \b
). -
Chirag Nayyar shared
-
AWS Inferentia, which are accelerators that are used in AWS EC2 for Deep Learning inference applications.
-
AWS Tranium, which are Machine Learning accelerators for deep learning training of 100B+ parameter models.
-
-
Google’s Project IDX is a new web-based editor that is in waitlist.
-
Wilfred Almeida told us how Planetscale operates without Foreign Keys.
-
Siddharth Bhatia shared Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse.
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 suggested using the Map My India API.
-
-
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.
-
Harsh Kapadia suggested watching What the heck is the event loop anyway?
-
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 shared how Stuxnet was able to compromise air-gapped nuclear systems of Iran.
-
-
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 toamd64
, 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^]
-
-
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.
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #148
Date: 09-09-2023
Duration: 2 hrs 36 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Prateek Pardeshi talked about using Spring Boot at work versus using Node.js.
-
We talked about why starting programming with Java rather than Python could be better. The general consensus was that Python spoils people with its in-built libraries and doesn’t expose them to a standard Object-Oriented Programming paradigm early on, which makes it difficult to adapt to such projects in the real world.
-
Obviously there is a lot of context involved in this point, as we were mainly considering Software Developers over people interested in AI and Data Science.
-
-
We talked about 6 Reasons Why Companies Don’t Update Their Technology
-
On a slightly unrelated note, Harsh Kapadia shared two articles.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about his project of turning a laptop into a server and the Dynamic DNS utility that he built for his project.
-
We talked about what Emacs is - an extensible, customizable text editor that can a do a lot more than just text editing. Some even consider it an entire Operating System!
-
In the same vein, Darshit Suratwala shared Alacrity, a modern terminal emulator that comes with sensible defaults, but allows for extensive configuration.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia shared three satires on Tech-enthusiast stereotypes.
-
Harsh Kapadia also shared
-
We talked about the difference between User Interface (UI) and Heads-Up Display (HUD) in games.
-
We talked about how Java decodes Unicode characters in programs before starting lexical translation.
-
This can potentially bypass security tool checks, because innocuous-looking Unicode in comments can be used to end comments and execute random code, much like what happens in SQL Injections.
-
Why is executing Java code in comments with certain Unicode characters allowed?
-
OTC CatchUp #147
Date: 02-09-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 46 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Darshit Suratwala shared Wudpecker to take automatic meeting notes and Rishit Dagli shared Firefly for the same.
-
Mohit Gangwani shared Network Chuck and LiveOverflow YouTube channels to learn more about Computer Networking and Cyber Security.
-
Jaden Furtado shared guidance-ai/guidance, a guidance language for controlling large language models.
-
Ayush Chauhan shared Anomaly Detection and Classification in Predictive Maintenance Tasks with Zero Initial Training.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how he converted his spare laptop into a server.
-
He made the server publicly available using a script he wrote, called dynamic-dns.
-
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
-
OTC CatchUp #146
Date: 26-08-2023
Duration: 4 hrs 40 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Siddharth Bhatia talked about an installer he is building to install GCC on Windows, to make the process easier for college students.
-
We discussed about Cygwin, MinGW, MSys and WSL
-
Siddharth’s installer is essentially unzipping a zip file containing a few software tools and adding those tools to the computer’s PATH variables.
-
Softwares that the installer adds
-
-
GNU Compiler Collection
-
It is one of the world’s most widespread compilers and compiles languages such as C, C++, Ada, Rust, Go, Fortran and many more.
-
-
-
The GNU Project Debugger
-
It is a very widely used Debugger that supports 12 languages (C, C++, Rust, Fortran, etc.) and is used to see what is going on inside another program while it executes or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.
-
-
-
GNU Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program’s source files.
-
The tool uses Makefiles to define build rules and targets.
-
GNU Make and Make are one and the same.
-
-
-
CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice.
-
-
-
It is a library used to convert text files with DOS or Mac line breaks to Unix line breaks and vice versa.
-
-
Yasm
-
NASM
-
JWasm
-
Ccache
-
Ninja
-
Doxygen
-
-
-
An experience at a Web3 conference, where it is difficult to understand where the satire starts and ends: I go to ABSURD tech conference.
-
Anil Harwani told us to remember two things
-
Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking, which talks about how if we don’t understand how we got 'here,' we run the risk of making things much worse.
-
-
Anil Harwani shared Breaking the x86 Instruction Set
-
We talked about Protection Rings (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3)
-
We also talked about System Management Mode (SMM), also called 'Ring -2'.
-
-
We talked about the basics of Zenbleed, an AMD Zen architectural bug.
-
We talked about the basics of AMD Inception, a Zen CPU exploit.
-
We talked about HashiCorp changing the license for Terraform.
-
Aditya Oberai talked about his Alt Text Generator alttext.in, which helps make the internet more accessible.
-
We joked about how companies love TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and FLAs (Four Letter Acronyms).
-
We talked about good Tech conferences
Attendees
-
Aashraay
-
Aditya Dikonda
-
Anil Harwani
-
Arpit Kesari
-
Atmaj Koppikar
-
Ayaan Shaikh
-
Bhavesh
-
Chaitanya Jhade
-
Chinmay Tullu
-
Dishita Das
-
Gaurang Pitale
-
Jaikishan Kamrani
-
Jash dharia
-
Jivansh C
-
Jyoti
-
Krishana Dave
-
Laksh Doshi
-
Mihir Patil
-
Parth Puranik
-
Pratham
-
Rahul G
-
Richa Rawani
-
Ronit Talreja
-
Sanam Bhatia
-
Sarvesh Yogi
-
Srishti
-
Trusha Madhav
-
Vedang Kulkarni
-
Yash Kadam
-
Zidan Shaikh
OTC CatchUp #145
Date: 19-08-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 30 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Jaden Furtado told us that he will be speaking at NullCon Goa 2023 on The Curious Case Of The Rogue SOAR.
-
Readings suggested by Anil Harwani
-
The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen.
-
Anil praised the simplicity of the blog which demonstrates how well the author understands concepts and also told us about his consistency of writing blogs, which was mind boggling!
-
-
Anil suggested reading The Mythical Man-Month once again, to understand how project requirements work with regards to clarifying the needs and goals, and figuring out how much time it needs and how many people it needs.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia added that he had read a few and that his favourite note is EWD1305: Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering
-
-
-
Videos suggested by Anil Harwani
-
We talked about the LTT Screwdriver and tools from iFixit and Wera Tools.
-
Anil Harwani told us about the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate, which was an argument where Tanenbaum was trying to prove why a Microkernel architecture (Tanenbaum’s OS Minix had that architecture.) is better than a Monolithic Kernel architecture that Torvald’s Linux has.
-
Kernel architectures
-
Minix
-
Tanenbaum initially created the Minix Operating System for educational purposes.
-
Anil also told us how Minix was found inside the Intel Management Engine, which was a big deal, as Minix, whose goal was never to have military-grade security, was being used on billions of machines at a privilege level that is higher than the kernel, and that made billions of machines vulnerable. Also, this implies that Minix is the most used OS on the planet.
-
Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux
-
The first 12 minutes of this video is sufficient to understand how vulnerable systems are.
-
-
What is MINIX? The most popular OS in the world, thanks to Intel
-
Tanenbaum also wrote An Open Letter to Intel.
-
-
-
-
Harsh Kapadia and Jaden Furtado discussed their liking for Asciidoctor, a Static Site Generator that Kartik Soneji got them hooked onto.
-
Cloudflare issues
-
We talked about how Google was DDoSing Root DNS servers.
-
Hussein Nasser and Arpit Bhayani were suggested for good Systems content.
-
Prathamesh Karambelkar told us that he was using Formik at work to build forms in React.js.
-
Kaustubh Khavnekar talked about his work and how he deals with burn out.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about his Dotfiles repository.
-
We discussed how everyone uses documentation, articles, blogs and YouTube videos to learn new things.
-
We talked about the Linus Tech Tips fiasco.
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:-
LiveOverflow: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClcE-kVhqyiHCcjYwcpfj9w
-
John Hammond: https://www.youtube.com/@_JohnHammond
-
Hack The Box: https://www.hackthebox.com/
-
-
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.
OTC CatchUp #143
Date: 05-08-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 22 mins
Topics Discussed
-
We discussed how good OTC MeetUp #3 was! People enjoyed the talks and all the conversations! We want to thank all the people who attended, our speakers and our partners!
-
Krishana Dave and Somya Barwa asked about JP Morgan & Chase's reduction in hiring and Deutsche Bank's increase in hiring.
-
Tushar Nankani shared his Deutsche Bank interview experience blog My Most Unorthodox Interview Experience.
-
-
Laptop restrictions and releases in India
-
Laptop import restrictions in India: India restricts laptop and server import to boost local manufacturing
-
In response, Reliance Jio released a new laptop called JioBook which is running an Android-based OS called JioOS.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia asked about how people have combatted burning out at their workplace and Tushar Nankani talked about how he worked a lot initially and then used the time afterwards to interact with people and learn from them. He participated in more activities and started looking at things broadly.
-
We touched upon a distributed agreement protocol called Paxos.
-
Real-time collaboration in text editors
-
Harsh Kapadia explained the basics of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) Nodes Per Socket (NPS) and how he had to configure that in BIOS settings for Network throughput measurements.
-
Anil Harwani talked about how it is important to know latency numbers for various operations on the Operating System level and told us to go through Latency numbers every programmer should know.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared a video of someone hacking a game by making modifications to it in-memory: I Hacked a Game from my Childhood (for REVENGE)
-
Harsh Kapadia told Nikshita Karkera the importance attending meetups (a good way to learn people’s experiences and the industry) and how it becomes easier to interact with new people after doing it a few times.
Attendees
-
Anil Karaniya
-
Anil Gohan
-
Krishana Dave
-
Priyanshu Gupta
-
Somya Barwa
-
Jay Aslaliya
-
Prajwal Dhule
-
Sampras Dsouza
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?"
OTC CatchUp #142
Date: 27-07-2023
Duration: 2 hrs 11 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Harsh Kapadia explained Pull Requests (PRs) to Chirag Nayyar and talked about what they mean, why they are required, why should one put in the effort into opening PRs, how it benefits both parties involved (the project’s maintainers and the contributor) and how people abuse Hacktoberfest.
-
Chirag Nayyar showed us his openprofile.dev Linux Foundation contribution dashboard and Rishit Dagli showed us devstats.cncf.io.
-
We talked about Red Hat’s Source Code Lockout Spells Disaster for CentOS Alternatives: Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux in Trouble?
-
Jaden Furtado shared a blog by Oracle on this (Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To) and we all thought that it was weird to see Oracle take the moral high ground, given their past debacles and competitive behaviours.
-
-
Chirag Nayyar talked about Google Daydream View, Google Stadia, Amazon DeepComposer and Amazon Fire Phone.
-
Rishit Dagli's hackathon experience
-
Rishit and his team built Into the ReviewVerse, a review website which would help people make better decisions with the help of all the reviews given on that product. On entering a product’s link, the web site outputs a list of pros and cons of the product.
-
Rishit told us how he broke down a huge LLaMA model into a base model, an adapter and a fine tuned model, instead of deploying the entire model as one.
-
Rishit also mentioned that he had to use four-bit precision floats instead of traditional 16-bit precision floats with his model as an optimization, as mentioned in GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers.
-
All the Machine Learning-related work and issues that he faced.
-
-
We talked about Cloudflare DNS issues that someone was facing. We informed them about the previous discussions we’ve had on Cloudflare’s DNS issues.
Projects Showcased
-
Siddharth Kaduskar showcased his project Bunker, an OCR-based attendance tracker that extracts lectures from the class timetable uploaded by users.
-
Website: bunker-sid.onrender.com
-
Technologies used: Express.js, React.js, Nanonets, Firebase
-
OTC CatchUp #141
Date: 22-07-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 36 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Siddharth Kaduskar shared CS50 Course on AI.
-
Ishan Sharma our PowerPoint Wizard gave a run through of his slides and how he made those for React Nexus.
-
Wilfred Almeida asked Rishit Dagli how he transpile TypeScript to WASM.
-
Rishit Dagli suggested him to use QuickJS
-
-
Chirag Nayyar shared about his sabbatical and how it has impacted his life.
-
Harsh Kapadia asked Chirag Nayyar what he thought of before taking sabbatical. To which he replied -
-
Financials were not his major concerns as he had a good idea about his expenses and had enough saved.
-
Coming to India where people generally know understand it was difficult for him.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia asked, how can someone if they should stick or leave a company?
-
Aditya Oberai said that he thinks that it depends on how much time you feel you can invest in a company.
-
For Darshan Rander it was like when you are getting bored of your work.
-
Aditya Oberai pointed that at certain times when you have dependents you can’t quit because you are bored and sometimes repetition is important.
-
-
Chirag Nayyar said that you should get involved in sales cycles so you will have a better idea of where company is headed and decide if it with you.
-
-
Darshan Rander asked wether he should get Google One subcription or self-host Immich (Google Photos alternative). The opinions are as follows -
-
Aditya Oberai said if your primary usecase if to share photos via links then Google Photos is a better option as it is with everyone.
-
Self hosting will be a fun and a good learning experience.
-
Google One will give storage for across all the Google products
-
-
Jay Kaku shared about Istio, it’s a service mesh which helps Kubernetes and traditional workloads to improve discoverablity.
-
Chirag Nayyar talked about ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and why it’s so confusing and how PUE (Power usage effectiveness) is calculated of a Data center.
-
Chirag Nayyar shared about how data center tiers are classified.
-
Chirag Nayyar talked about cloud repatriation and why people are considering to go away from cloud.
OTC CatchUp #140
Date: 15-07-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 36 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Sejal Jain talked about her conversion from an intern to a full-time employee at Zomato and shared her experience working with PHP, Go, MySQL and DynamoDB.
-
Viranchee L talked about his experience building security features using C, C++ and Python as an intern at Qualcomm.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how Kartik Soneji improved the GitHub Actions workflow of the OTC CatchUp GitHub repository that sends reminder and joining Tweets and Telegram messages for OTC CatchUp sessions.
-
Jaden Furtado talked about how his team qualified for the second round of a CTF CISS 2022.
-
One of the problems they faced looked like the Shellshock vulnerability.
-
-
Preet Parekh talked about an issue where an update query (using Painless) to around 10 million Elasticsearch documents was taking around eight minutes to reflect to the end user!
-
Just inserting new documents and deleting the older documents is one potential solution, as Elasticsearch is able to handle that with much lesser latency.
-
-
Wilfred Almeida talked about how some ISPs use the Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) protocol to authenticate users.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how Captive Portals are used to display WiFi login screens when a user logs into a WiFi network for the first time.
-
Wilfred Almeida talked about his issues with transactions on Supabase.
-
Wilfred Almeida asked whether anyone had used Proxmox, a Virtualization management software like VMware, as he was facing issues with SeaBIOS and UEFI.
-
-
Wilfred Almeida shared HPKS: High Performance Kubernetes Scheduling for Dynamic Blockchain Workloads in Cloud Computing.
-
Darshit Suratwala shared his KCD Mumbai 2023 talk Blockchain goes Kubernetes.
-
Wilfred shared his KCD Mumbai 2023 talk How to Not-Mess-Up Production as well.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how a lot of people expressed their disdain for the lack of empathy in a Tweet thread by Dukaan’s CEO marketing a product by boasting about laying off employees and for dismissing concerns for laid off employees in a very offhand way.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about his experimentation with Vim plugins. He started using vim-plug as his plugin manager and the EditorConfig and the vim-shfmt plugins.
-
Harsh’s dotfiles: HarshKapadia2/dotfiles
-
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) of a server motherboard gets its own IP and has its own web interface to help configure the motherboard (turning power on or off, updating BIOS and board firmware, getting a GUI for the machine, etc.) and how he used
ipmitool
to re-gain lost access to the BMC by re-configuring a password for the defaultadmin
user. -
Harsh Kapadia talked about his Networking experiment at his internship at AMD, where he had to configure two servers and a Mellanox SN2100 Switch to be able to achieve a throughput of 100 Gbps over Ethernet.
-
He talked about how it was a challenge to set up and configure the server and switches to be able to ping each other, as he needed to realise that
-
Connecting to the switch to be able to configure it and enable SSH access to it, required a console cable, which is supposed to be a serial cable.
-
The servers required the
MLNX_OFED
drivers` so that the Mellanox ConnectX-5 NIC could be configured.
-
-
He was only able to achieve 20 Gbps when he used iperf3 to check his network connectivity for the first time.
-
He then mentioned that he would write a blog on the BIOS (NPS, etc.), OS, iperf3 and CPU optimizations that he had to make to get the throughput to 60 Gbps.
-
Preet Parekh shared A $15,000 Network Switch?? - 100GbE Networking.
-
-
We talked a little about InfiniBand as well, which uses the concept of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) to speed up Networking. It is an alternative to Ethernet.
Projects Showcased
-
Siddharth Kaduskar showcased his attendance manager project that he built using Express.js and React.js. He is using NanoNets for OCR.
-
Rishi Setpal shared his React.js projects.
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.
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #137
Date: 24-06-2023
Duration: 4 hrs 42 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Sampras D’Souza told us that he is working on Engineering Experience and Productivity, to make it easier for Developers at his company to build products.
-
Darshit Suratwala showed us a Grafana dashboard that his company uses in its product, to produce graphs and other visuals for telemetry data collected from Prometheus, which periodically collects data from various data sources.
-
From Get started with Grafana and Prometheus:
> Prometheus is an open source monitoring system for which Grafana provides out-of-the-box support. [...] create a series of dashboards in Grafana to display system metrics for a server monitored by Prometheus.
-
Darshit also shared a Grafana meetup happening in Mumbai.
-
k6, a Load-Testing software by Grafana Labs, was also shared.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia shared Seeing the World through Your Eyes, an AI project that constructs a 3D image of the scene in front of a person through reflections seen in their eyes in a portrait image.
-
Shiva Charan shared Vision and Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE), an instruction-guided task that navigates the environment based on commands given by a user.
-
Darshan Rander talked about his Flutter Pull Request fix: wrong expansion tile shape assignment.
-
We discussed how he found the issue while building a project and how he followed dependencies from one file to another in the Flutter source code to locate the exact code block causing the issue.
-
Darshan also told us how Flutter makes use of various tests to automatically test their code base on-the-fly. He told us how for some tests, actual app screens are rendered and compared pixel-by-pixel to figure out if the test passed or failed, and another set of tests that simulated Flutter’s rendering in code by just comparing node trees.
-
-
Kartik Soneji showed us various ways in which GitHub enables comparisons between new and old images in a Pull Request.
-
Harsh Kapadia asked Kartik Soneji to review his
setup
Bash script for his dotfiles repository.-
Kartik recommended putting the script through shellcheck.net to iron out issues and that resulted in a few safety changes of quoting variables.
-
-
Anush Veeranala showed us how customizable and powerful GNU Emacs is, with calendars and planners built into it. It is considered to be an Operating System in itself!
-
He told us about how Emacs supports Elisp and GNU Guile for configurations. They are Turing Complete languages.
-
-
Anush Veeranala also showed us his Operating System GNU Guix, which is highly customizable.
-
We talked about What is the difference between clang (and LLVM) and gcc / g++?
-
Kartik Soneji told us about the difference between Curl and Wget and also showcased how the
--libcurl
flag in Curl outputs pure C code that can be used to do the action the user requested through the command.-
Curl is an extremely important library and a almost all software depends on it in some way.
-
-
Kartik Soneji showed us how GCC and Clang compile and optimize their code, by showing us Assembly output in godbolt.org. He also showed us why Python is inefficient, due to repeated unoptimized function calls and other design-related tradeoffs.
Attendees
-
Gunner Gunning
-
Hiten Gerella
-
Krishana Dave
-
Kulkarni Swamini
-
Mohit Gangwaniwitter.com/mohit_explores[Mohit Gangwani^]
-
Mr Raam
-
Parith Garg
-
Piush Paul
-
Pranjal Ekhande
-
Priyansh Salian
-
Rithvik R
-
Sanket Dalvi
-
Shiva Charan
-
Shiven Sharma
-
Sri Harsha
-
The Algorithmic
-
Yash Ranawat
-
Jay Aslaliya
-
Sampras D’Souza
-
Shiva Charan
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.
-
KCD Mumbai took a unique approach with Visual Summary to sum up the event contents.
-
-
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.
-
Overclocking a CPU locks the clock frequency of the CPU to a higher value than the default value, so one should be careful while doing it.
-
Few people from Harsh Kapadia's team at AMD went for Computex and they saw some interesting products under development.
-
Harsh Kapadia and Mohit Gangwani shared some interesting videos:
-
How AMD Zen Almost Didn’t Make It. The video is about the Zen architecture which is paramount to the further development of AMD datacenter and consumer-based CPUs.
-
-
-
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.
-
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 Bhatia shared information on the issue: Reddit Incomplete and Growing List of Participating Mods.
-
-
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.
-
Siddharth Bhatia mentioned John Carmack, the creator of Doom, and his decade in the VR space after Oculus was acquired by Meta. Source: John Carmack on Meta, Facebook, VR, Oculus Rift, Doom.
-
-
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.
-
The Phoenix Project and Atomic Habits were mentioned as recommended books.
-
Thinking in Systems was shared as a valuable resource.
-
Introduction to Genetic Algorithms was also discussed.
-
-
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.
-
Fireship.io’s Video: High-school student makes React a million times faster (which, in fact, is featured on their landing page.)
-
It explains how React’s Virtual DOM is pure overhead and how Million.js reduces overhead by using a fine-tuned, optimized virtual DOM.
-
-
They have also benchmarked it: demo.million.dev
-
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.
-
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.
OTC CatchUp #133
Date: 27-05-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 40 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Wilfred Almeida and Pranav Dani discussed how some pirated websites also have good infrastructure.
-
Piracy is illegal in most countries, but some are very serious about it and penalize it heavily.
-
Harsh Kapadia studied the working of Tor in one of his courses.
-
Harsh Kapadia's shared his learnings about Tor.
-
-
-
We talked about Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin and its flaws.
-
We discussed how one can adjust their Twitter feed using the three-dot menu to avoid irrelevant content on the feed.
-
Pranav Dani shared that some routers allow content filtering, blocking keywords, URLs and domains.
-
Darshan Rander asked him to block advertising domains.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared 12ft.io, a service that blocks paywalls.
-
-
Jio disabled FTP and media serving on their routers.
-
Wilfred Almeida suggested flashing custom firmware like DD-WRT/OpenWRT on the router to enable FTP and/or customize other settings.
-
-
-
Wilfred Almeida talked about hosting and load balancing.
-
He demonstrated his setup using Nginx and Kubernetes.
-
Nginx is used for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing and media streaming.
-
He shared his blog post on Custom CI/CD Pipeline.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia showcased his cloudflare DNS records that he set up for redirecting his static sites to his domain.
-
-
We talked about the Browser Company, based on this tweet and how it looks potentially useful and aesthetically pleasing.
-
Sreekaran Srinath tried it out and he did not trust the browser since it wasn’t open source.
-
Other than that, he suggested the browser had a good design and some useful features like Zap for removing certain elements from a webpage and Boost for color change.
-
On these lines, Harsh Kapadia talked about a browser extension that he uses to hide stats on Twitter to avoid bias.
-
Pranav Dani shared Unhook, a browser for removing YouTube recommendations to avoid the vicious circle of wasting time.
-
-
Aditya Oberai talked about why companies keep their products closed source.
-
-
Aditya Oberai shared his premise and thought process behind his recent blog on ARCC about Why I’m Skeptical Of Web3: An Outsider’s Perspective.
-
Harsh Kapadia shared his experience of building his development machine with an AMD EPYC Milan.
-
We talked about PC configuration and building rigs.
-
One can use CPU-Z for learning about the important components of a PC.
-
Projects Showcased
-
Darshan Rander showcased a game that he built using Flutter and Flame engine.
-
It is supposed to be a work in progress for the Appwrite hackathon.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Choosing the right professors for courses based on Google Scholar and not Ratemyprofessor.
-
Handling food and cooking.
-
-
Dheeraj Lalwani shared some links about the community around languages:
-
All Things Distributed, blogs by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.
-
RIIR, considering rewriting stuff in Rust.
-
-
Jay Kaku and Pranav Dani talked about system circuits and the evolution of binary.
-
Why Lightbulbs Might Be The Best Invention Ever - a video by Veritasium which talks about the usage of light bulbs and circuits to explain the evolution of circuits.
-
Bulbs and vacuum tubes used up a lot of power and required frequent replacements. This is what rendered them impractical and unreliable.
-
-
Division operation is a pain for ARM processors since most don’t have a dedicated circuit that can deal with FPU (Floating Point Unit) division operations.
-
-
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.
-
OTC CatchUp #131
Date: 13-05-2023
Duration: 4 hrs 41 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Vatsal Patel talked about his learnings at his workplace and how he is currently working with different teams to understand how they are working.
-
He told us how he has been practising not asking someone to give him direct answers, but to only review his work, give him feedback and point him in the correct direction.
-
If someone is very busy and stressed, they may give direct answers when asked for help, without having time for a detailed discussion. So, it’s important to ask the right questions to get the specific information one needs. It is our own responsibility to seek the type of mentorship we want and not entirely rely on someone else to provide it.
-
-
He has also started not directly handing off work that he doesn’t understand to someone else. He tries to understand it as much as he can and ask for help.
-
He has been trying to dig deeper into concepts and his work, to be able to understand things better.
-
He also shared a talk on Automated Testing and Profiling for Call of Duty.
-
-
We talked about how CS:GO Source 2 might have Tickless servers.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how Google introducing
.zip
,.mov
and.foo
Top Level Domains (TLDs) could cause security and convenience problems for end users. -
We talked about how Google I/O 2023 hardly talked about Artificial Intelligence. 😉
-
We talked about the release of the new Zelda game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and how people are really excited for it.
-
Some people were surprised to know that Amazon has a Cloud Gaming service called Amazon Luna.
-
Anil Harwani talked about how ProcessIdleTasks in Windows can be used to complete all tasks that the CPU usually only performs while idle before starting a benchmarking test, so that the assessment is not affected.
-
Anil Harwani told us some of the websites that he keeps a watch on to learn about new happenings on the hardware side of things
-
Daniel Stenberg’s blog (creator of curl)
-
Related article: curl: 25 years and 200 releases later
-
-
An interesting utility snips.sh was shared, which is a password-less, anonymous SSH-powered pastebin with a human-friendly TUI and web UI.
-
A Crisis in Engineering Education - Where are the Microelectronics Engineers?
-
Anil Harwani shared Sapphire Rapids: Golden Cove Hits Servers.
-
We talked about how Imposter Syndrome and the fear of not knowing something are things that are going to stay with us forever and how it gets easier to handle these feelings with time. We all talked about how messing up and keeping on going forward after that is good.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how Dheeraj Lalwani wanted to conduct a backend-focused OTC CatchUp session. Everyone pitched in and it was suggested that certain areas in the wide backend domain should be pre-decided to start the discussion and the session should then be opened up. Another idea was to try to approach experienced people to join the session and share their knowledge.
-
Darshan Rander, Harsh Kapadia and Aditya Oberai talked about whether OTC requires analytics on its web pages, whether all web pages should have it or just a certain sub-set of pages, and which analytics solutions can be considered. It has to be decided whether it is worth for the OTC team to invest time into adding analytics to the web pages. Some of the self-hosted analytics solutions considered were Plausible, Mixpanel and Umami.
-
Saifuddin Saifee and Aditya Oberai talked about the business model of Open Source companies and how it includes people buying their products and support, scaling and upgrading their services, public maintenance and support work, and more.
-
Aditya Oberai also talked about the Appwrite Cloud Hackathon, a month-long hackathon for people to build interesting products using Appwrite Cloud.
-
Aditya Oberai and Saifuddin Saifee talked about how moving to a new city can be scary.
OTC CatchUp #130
Date: 06-05-2023
Duration: 4 hrs 30 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Devarshi Shah, Dheeraj Lalwani and Harsh Kapadia talked about their Web Development journeys till date.
-
Dheeraj Lalwani and Harsh Kapadia talked about Client-Side Rendering vs Server-Side Rendering and React.js vs Next.js.
-
Dheeraj Lalwani talked about his Open Source contribution of adding lyrics support to a self-hosted music server and streaming service, Navidrome, as a part of a college project.
-
Harsh Kapadia and Anil Harwani talked about how helpful The Missing Semester of Your CS Education is and recommended that everyone should do it.
-
Anil Harwani shared Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI".
-
Rishit Dagli told us how he uses Slurm, a Workload Manager to schedule jobs via a command line.
-
Harsh Kapadia talked about how helpful Regular Expressions (RegEx) are and Rishit Dagli talked about the equivalence between RegEx and Finite State Automata.
-
Rishit Dagli and Harsh Kapadia discussed how some people take certain courses in college mainly to interact with the brilliant professor teaching it, so that they’re able to work with them in the future on a research paper, pick their brains for knowledge or to just get noticed by the professor. Everyone has a different perspective on the matter and none of them are better than the other. Everyone’s opinion is valid in some way.
-
Anil Harwani, Aditya Oberai and Harsh Kapadia talked about the blog Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90% by Amazon Prime Video Tech and how it is causing an uproar in the Cloud community.
-
Prime Video Swaps Microservices for Monolith: 90% Cost Reduction
-
Anil told us to be aware of veiled agendas and marketing while reading such Engineering blogs by companies, because 'Time is money' and if companies are allowing Engineers to put in time into writing blogs rather than work on their unending tasks, then there is something in it for the company as well.
-
Trying to figure out and break down the reason for putting out a blog is one way to try to figure out the veiled agenda being pushed.
-
A lot of these posts also generate a lot of uproar, which brings eyes to certain products that the company might be wanting to market as a better and more cost efficient solution.
-
Anil advised us to follow more of core Engineering people who are known to be about the Engineering aspect of things.
-
An example he gave: Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances
-
-
-
-
Siddharth Bhatia shared nb, a CLI and local web plain text note-taking, bookmarking and archiving program that can version using Git. It has a LOT of features!
-
Aditya Oberai, Rishit Dagli and Harsh Kapadia talked about House Leasing red flags, how mistakes help in learning and how experienced people’s opinions and advice are helpful.
-
Harsh talked about how he has been realising the importance of listening to experienced people more and more throughout the years. In the end decisions definitely have to be made on one’s terms, but it is wise to at least seek out an experienced opinion before taking a huge decision.
-
-
Aditya Oberai talked about his 'Alt Text Generator' project (alttext.in) and how he plans to use GPT-4's image input API for the alt text generation once it releases.
-
Pranav Dani's laptop broke down during the session and while debugging the issue Anil Harwani shared "Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken".
-
Anil Harwani advised us to think more about the direction of our careers, about exactly what we plan to achieve by doing something (why, how, exactly what, etc.), and think and research more before investing heaps of money on something, for example, higher education.
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.
-
Blog: Leap of Faith
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
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.
-
The issue: Build error:
cpu_khz
undeclared.
-
-
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.
-
Aditya Oberai suggested that most such groups are meant as accountability partners.
-
Darshan Rander offered Siddharth Kaduskar to work on additional features for Heartry to evaluate if he wants to work with someone or not.
-
-
We talked about how one can find good partners for Hackathons.
-
Sreekaran Srinath and Aditya Oberai shared their experiences from MLH and individual indie hacking.
-
-
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.
-
He also talked about error codes (Error code: 1202 - issues with ∆H and Error code: 1201 - Landing Point Designator) and the creation of programming languages in now familiar verb and noun fashion.
-
He talked about the computations and issues like bitflip in Falcon 9.
-
These issues are solved by having multiple computers running the same calculations so that even if one or two are wrong, the majority will be right.
-
Bitflip generally happens due to radiation in space. There are ways to prevent it, but the methods are costly, so having multiple systems perform the same task is a better solution.
-
-
OTC CatchUp #127
Date: 15-04-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 43 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Rishit Dagli and Harsh Kapadia talked about Artificial Intelligence (AI).
-
Rishit talked about how ChatGPT, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are Engineering marvels rather than research marvels. They keep adding more data and parameter-handling capabilities to the models.
-
Harsh brought up AWS CodeWhisperer and other AWS AI announcements and Rishit said that these new products are all battles of 'Who has more data and compute?' rather than pure AI innovations.
-
Harsh brought up Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Rishit said that a lot of very reputed professors are claiming that AGI is nowhere near and might not be discovered through these Large Language Models (LLMs) that people claim are going to lead to AGI.
-
Harsh talked about how one of his professors, Dr. Gabriel Kaptchuk is using LLMs in his Steganography research project Meteor to hide text in text.
-
Rishit talked about how he is learning a lot from working with his professors Dr. Jimmy Ba and Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, who have both done immense work in AI.
-
Rishit shared his research paper Astroformer: More Data Might Not be All You Need for Classification that got published! 🎉
-
Rishit also shared his personal page on the University of Toronto web site.
-
Rishit told us how all ML models fundamentally use gradients to try to get closer to the correct answer from the answer it generated, and how doing away with gradients would presumably make models more efficient and easier to train.
-
Rishit added that there is loads of amazing research going on in AI that is currently not in the limelight.
-
-
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.
-
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 withoutsleep()
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.
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.
-
Siddharth Kaduskar talked about the reasons behind using Nanonets OCR for splitting the timetable PDF into rows and columns to identify lectures.
-
-
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.
-
Darshan Rander suggested that he might use some service or powerautmate to transfer playlists from Spotify to Youtube 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.
OTC CatchUp #125
Date: 01-04-2023
Duration: 04 hrs 23 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General introductions.
-
Harsh Kapadia gave a brief of the week’s tech news.
-
Apple wins appeal against UK’s decision to investigate its mobile browser
-
GitHub’s Private RSA SSH Key Mistakenly Exposed in Public Repository and it’s security implications.
-
Twitter open-sourced it’s recommendation algorithm on GitHub at twitter/the-algorithm and twitter/the-algorithm-ml.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia and Rishit Dagli shared a few funny Pull Requests (PRs) from the twitter/the-algorithm repository.
-
A PR which removed author_is_elon which prioritizes Elon Musk’s tweets.
-
Humra change merge karo! was unfortunately another PR title.
-
-
Rishit Dagli and Jay Kaku cleared our confusion between Most Significant Bit and Least Significant Bit, Higher Order Bit and Lower Order Bit, and Little Endian and Big Endian.
-
Jay Kaku talked about his final year project. He is building a Fast Fourier Transform Core (Processor) on FPGA with Fixed point representation.
-
One of its use cases is for timbre or tone detection of an instrument.
-
-
Jay Kaku shared Paul Horowitz’s Interview, the author of The Art of Electronics which is considered as the Bible for people working with electronics.
-
Rishit Dagli shared slides of best practices guidelines for SIGGRAPH figures.
-
Darshan Rander talked about WASM I/O 2023.
-
It is a new field, and many companies are building tools around it.
-
The general availability of a Garbage Collector in the WebAssembly (WASM) ecosystem is fairly near, as it is already available for Google Chrome’s beta users.
-
-
Jay Kaku shared a new kind of cab booking service called Namma Yatri, which is based on ONDC's Beckn Protocol.
-
Saket Thota, Krishna Gadia and Harsh Kapadia talked about the benefits of Competitive Programming (CP) and discussed how it helps with quick thinking and writing optimized code. Obviously just like everything else, CP has its own drawbacks in writing unreadable and overly-optimized code.
-
Harsh Kapadia encouraged Saket Thota to use his experience to bring experienced Competitive Programmers together to talk about topics deeper than the usual 'Getting Started with Competitive Programming' topics. He also suggested talking about how problems are made and the rationale behind certain ways of solving problems.
-
Krishna Gadia recommended reading Cracking the Coding Interview to do well in interviews, because even if Competitive Programming (CP) is not what will be done on the job, problem solving (which is essentially CP), is what is done daily on the job.
-
CP is an easier way to test problem solving skills than solving a real-world (on-the-job) problem.
-
-
Krishna Gadia and Anil Harwani talked about how one should cope with leaving jobs by taking a small break (if financially affordable), looking for jobs through friends and interviewing at multiple places.
-
Krishna Gadia asked Harsh Kapadia to name the activities in his life that take up a lot of time and Harsh struggled to name all of them, leading both to realise that he needs to measure his time use better.
-
Krishna Gadia and Harsh Kapadia also talked about the difference between Importance and Urgency to have the correct priorities in life. Harsh talked about how he has only been able to partially implement this in his life.
-
Krishna Gadia advised Harsh Kapadia to reduce unnecessary brain engagement to free mental capacity to be able to think more and with clarity.
-
Things like always playing music while working and continuously watching engaging content during breaks leads to brain capacity being used quite a bit.
-
Being present in the moment, mindful and cognizant can help a lot.
-
Meditating or just sitting and focusing on one’s breath while not thinking of anything else is one way to calm oneself and reduce engagement.
-
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.
-
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 tried to compare Google’s BARD and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, standard text models for generating text completions.
-
Google Bard… the ChatGPT killer? - a video by Fireship.
-
-
We discussed the differences between GPT-4 and ChatGPT-4.
-
GPT-4 is currently allowing its users to make requests through its API.
-
ChatGPT-4 requires the ChatGPT Plus subscription.
-
-
Kartik Soneji discussed the experiments with Microsoft integrating AI into its search bar, which also integrates bing.
-
-
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
-
Madhav Vishwakarma
-
Ajay Maurya
-
Altaf Alam
-
Aman Manapure
-
Anil Harwani
-
Arush
-
Atharva Jadhav
-
Bhupesh Varshney
-
Darshit Suratwala
-
Dhruvit Diyora
-
Harshal Shekdar
-
Hiten Gerella
-
Hrishikesh Dhuri
-
Jarrett Fok
-
Jeevika
-
Krishana Dave
-
Laksh Doshi
-
Mohd Abuzaid Ansari
-
Naveen Pandey
-
Raghav Rathi
-
Tanmay Sankpal
-
Varshith Kumar
-
Vivek Namaye
-
curious wiki
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.
-
Wilfred Almeida claimed that it promises sort of GPT like functions without the need of a GPU.
-
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
-
Darshan Rander showcased newer updates to Heartry - An App for Writers
-
Siddharth Bhatia showcased Tkinter Demos which is a collection of Tkinter Programs that he has written.
-
He primarily showcased the Simple Calculator, the Image Viewer, the CRUD Database App, and the Weather App.
-
All these apps are written in Python using the Tkinter GUI Library.
-
The purpose of doing this was for me to learn Tkinter.
-
I learn by doing, and I followed along with FreeCodeCamp’s Tkinter Course
OTC CatchUp #122
Date: 11-03-2023
Duration: 2 hrs 30 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Hrishikesh Dhuri explained his startup idea for an e-commerce platform and what he is trying to build.
-
Kartik Soneji asked a few questions regarding the delivery, return policy and how they were going to tackle it.
-
Pijamo Ngullie gave his insights about how the concerned industry works.
-
-
Pijamo Ngullie shared a badly designed site and Kartik Soneji tried to find security vulnerablities in it.
-
Rishit Dagli shared a paper on Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback.
-
We discussed about what GSoC is and how someone can increase their chances of getting selected as a mentee.
-
The consensus was if the organization already knows you and you are an active contributor then it becomes easier.
-
-
We had a discussion on Silicon Valley Bank crash.
-
Siddharth Kaduskar asked about the hiring process of JPMC.
-
Darshan Rander shared Tushar Nankani's blog on JPMC’s Internship’s Interview Experience
-
-
Siddharth Kaduskar asked how he should make a resume.
-
We suggested him to use resume builders like HackerResume or use overleaf.com to make resumes from a template using LaTeX.
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.
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.
-
We delved a bit into the math behind the representation of tensors and what texture means. Most of it revolves around Matrices.
-
The operations revolving around matrix calculations in his project are performed using GPU.
-
We discussed some ways to imagine higher dimensions.
-
Relevant links:
-
Thinking outside the 10-dimensional box - a video by 3Blue1Brown.
-
-
-
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 suggested that this might be a spinoff and that the real researchers who built it were Stability AI.
-
-
-
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.-
Affected coding competitions include code jam, kick start, hash code, and more.
-
Alphabet fires 100 robots that cleaned cafés, shuts down Everyday Robots project
-
Other coding competitions like ICPC and CodeChef are still going strong.
-
-
We discussed some ways in which CatchUp Summaries could be automated.
-
Google Meet supports native attendance recording but only for the Enterprise or Business users.
-
-
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.-
We have also discussed about it in one of the previous cathups.
-
-
-
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.
-
He also shared a blog about - Good First Issues Don’t Exist.
-
-
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.
-
Reason being - Business logic hasn’t changed for a long time.
-
It is a very stable and trustworthy system.
-
Anil Harwani shared a list of software practices required by nasa:
-
-
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
.
-
OTC CatchUp #119
Date: 18-02-2023
Duration: 3 hrs 30 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Saifuddin Saifee asked how Ambient Mode in YouTube works on the backend.
-
Most of us presumed that the feature would be handled on the fly, on the client side — by picking up a few primary colors from the video.
-
However, Ramyak Mehra suggested that colors are pre-processed alongside other metadata when a video is being uploaded and that data is supplied to the client while streaming.
-
-
We held the second edition of OTC Talks session with Omkar Khair giving a talk on 'Internals of an Email Relay'.
-
Find the talk abstract and other relevant links — OTC Talks #2
-
The talk covered interesting ideas about an e-mail relay, e-mail metadata, SPF, DKIM, a Zero Ops approach and the total cost of building an e-mail relay.
-
Omkar also demonstrated the application Dopemin - Firewall for your Email — that he along with 8 users (friends and family) have been using seamlessly for the past three years.
-
The project was implemented using AWS Lambda, Amazon SES, Amazon SNS, Cloud Functions for Firebase, Cloud Firestore and Authentication from Firebase, and the interface was built using Vue.js.
-
We discussed interesting problems around it like how scaling such applications is not a problem due to generous limits offered by services like AWS, but the abuse of such applications becomes a problem.
-
Relevant links
-
-
Harsh Kapadia asked whether it was more common to have a single keypair for signing and encryption or do people usually have different keypairs for both functions.
-
Anil explained why using the keys is based on need and context.
-
Concepts that were mentioned while explaining:
-
-
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is the scheme of encryption, signing and other functions.
-
OpenPGP is a standard that softwares implementing PGP can follow to meet safe and standard practices.
-
GPG/GnuPG (GNU [GNU’s Not Unix] Privacy Guard) is a tool that implements PGP using the OpenPGP standard and enables encrypting and signing e-mails, files, etc.
-
-
Rishit Dagli shared cs144.github.io and 2022-cs244.github.io.
-
Anil Harwani shared a blog about Avoiding the standard library
libc
. -
Darshit Suratwala talked about his work at Sacle3 on products such as Autopilot (a Blockchain node monitoring solution).
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).
-
Anil Harwani suggested looking into the (Classic) Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF/cBFP) and the Extended BPF (eBPF).
-
-
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.
-
The video that triggered this rant: 7 better ways to create a React app
-
An example of how complicated things are: Modern Rendering Patterns
-
We need to stop with the 'Shiny Object Syndrome'.
-
-
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.
-
Quality of problems over the quantity of problems.
-
-
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
-
Deeksha Sharma
-
Aanya Singh Dhaka
-
Aditi Katehra
-
Aishwarya Chandra
-
Anamika Pandey
-
Anil Harwani
-
Ankita Prajapati
-
Ankur Ankit
-
Anshu Kadyan
-
Anushka Shankar
-
Apoorva Gilhotra
-
Arushi
-
Azmeen khatoon
-
Charvi Gupta
-
Gauri Maheshwari
-
Jia Harisinghani
-
Krishana Dave
-
Prachi Yadav
-
Queen Devashi
-
Raghav Rathi
-
Sneha Singh
-
Vaishali Kataria
-
Vashitva Bagga
-
Muskan Kumari
-
Sunishka
-
Vidushi
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.
-
Question: Should an Indian Developer move to EU? a list of comparisons by Amul Badjatya
-
-
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.
-
Rishit shared a similar project - slidesmart that he was working on.
-
Ashwin shared fireflies.ai.
-
-
Ashwin asked advice on how to scale communities.
-
Dheeraj Lalwani shared how they managed 2 offline OTC MeetUps.
-
Ashwin shared his experience working with Hackerabad.
-
-
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
-
Raghav Rathi showcased a Chat GPT Gmail Bot
OTC CatchUp #116
Date: 28-01-2023
Duration: 5 hrs 12 mins
Topics Discussed
-
Dheeraj Lalwani shared the portfolio of Russ Cox, creator of GoLang.
-
Tushar Nankanian interesting article: Our Software Dependency Problem by Russ Cox on OTC’s Telegram group.
-
Dheeraj Lalwani suggested everyone to go through his blogs for learning some fundamentals.
-
-
Siddharth Bhatia asked for resources to learn assembly so Anil Harwani suggested he learn by example.
-
Anil Harwani shared these articles to get started:
-
Tushar Nankani, Pranav Daniand Dheeraj Lalwani dissected the OTC’s CatchUp repository to show how everything it works.
-
The site uses GitHub workflows to build and deploy the site, and ascii doctor to render the content written in Markdown.
-
-
We went through cult.fit's design principles.
-
It uses Aurora design principle for all of its websites where they divide components into atoms and molecules.
-
Many companies have a blog about their design decisions which can be quite insightful.
-
Tushar Nankanishared links for Raunak Shah (cult.fit's Product Designer).
-
-
We discussed Razorpay's design decisions.
-
Tushar Nankanishared his findings related to Razorpay’s design decisions in this Twitter thread.
-
Razorpay uses tilt.js for their homepage.
-
It had the
!important
tag used a lot in their CSS file which is considered bad practice since it might be inconvenient for other people to work with.
-
-
-
Devfolio has a keyboard-friendly UI.
-
The rectangle overlaps in the cards have smooth transitions which look seamless.
-
Also keyboard shortcuts somehow do not intersect for browser and Devfolio's webpage.
-
Tushar Nankanialso showcased Preet’s Portfolio website: pre.et, which also implements keyboard shortcuts with
CTRL + K
.
-
-
Pranav Danishared that Heroku took down the free tier projects.
-
We talked about why one should not become dependent on a single platform.
-
Rishit suggested some free alternatives such as railway.app and platform.sh.
-
-
We talked about how card payments in the US not requiring OTPs seem like a scary thing. Reference: CatchUp 114.
-
We talked about how Google’s new search algorithm works.
-
We discussed some of the quirks that come with using SBI bank accounts.
-
Setting up two passwords for SBI’s internet banking is a pain.
-
The employees working there figure out the issues and figure things out with the customer.
-
-
Vatsal Patel shared how he maintains his credit scores.
-
-
Saifuddin Saifee talked about the interactive game that he created for his SIH project.
-
We talked about the improvements in IRCTC after it was privatized and handled by TCS.
-
Pranav Danishared the blog regarding changes in the google play’s terms and conditions.
Projects Showcased
-
Dheeraj Lalwani showcased Contacts, an app that he is making while learning how to use React.
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 tomysqli_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.
-
Attendees
-
Ananya Verma
-
Anil Harwani
-
Ayush Bhosle
-
Ayush Chauhan
-
Jia Harisinghani
-
Krishna Dave
-
Navya Agarwal
-
Prateek Pardeshi
-
Ritojnan Mukherjee
-
Saarthak Kumar
-
Yash Wavdankar
-
Altaf Alam
-
Atharva Honrao
-
atharva yadav
-
Bhavesh Garud
-
Cloud Core
-
Dg Star
-
Divyansh Singh
-
Gaurav Ghade
-
Harsh Sharma
-
Harshal Shekdar
-
Hiten Dusseja
-
Manas Thadhani
-
Manish Dusa
-
Naveen Pandey
-
Prasad Satpute
-
Raj Yadav
-
Ruturaj Chandgude
-
Sakshi Bhandari
-
Sarvesh Parab
-
shruti singh
-
Shrutik Gupta
-
Tushar Shelke
-
Vaishnavi More
-
Vidhi Vaishnav
-
Vighnesh Hinge
-
Vrajesh H
-
who else but Tullu
-
Yo Yo
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.
-
-
-
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 discussed how people can also write servers in C and Bash. Anil Harwani shared an article about writing a server in 1 line.
-
-
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
-
Siddharth Bhatia showcased his project Custom Tkinter Calculator that he built using Python, Tkinter and Custom Tkinter.
-
It is a calculator built with a unique GUI library known as Custom Tkinter which helps with a better-looking interface while keeping the code mostly the same.
-
-
Anas Khan showcased his project CodeClip built using Flask, Bootstrap and jQuery.
-
It is an online clipboard service to save work in progress.
-
-
Wilfred Almeida showcased his project MobXcess, secure server access from mobile devices.
-
It is a mobile app for handling some server commands and the use case pertains to frequent actions for a server.
-
Article link: MobXcess: Secure Server Access from Mobile Devices
-
-
Rishit Dagli showcased Invariant Point Attention, a machine learning model that he implemented using Python, and the Math library.
-
It uses Alphafold2 which introduces a nice form of attention mechanism that allows you to see 3D models as the same object across transformations.
-
This project is modified to be a standalone Deep Learning model that you can use for any kind of 3D tasks.
-
Attendees
-
Anil Harwani
-
Arun Kumar
-
Atmaj Koppikar
-
Isihita Rakchhit
-
Minal Verma
-
Manshi
-
Aditya Barmol
-
Anamika Ratna
-
Anshu Roy
-
Arushi
-
Disha
-
Gazz
-
Gaurav Panjabi
-
Jia Harisinghani
-
Hrishikesh Dhuri
-
Kunal Chhablani
-
Meet Morpana
-
Muskan
-
Navya Agarwal
-
Neetika Tandon
-
Payal Narwal
-
Priyanshu Gupta
-
Rashid Aziz
-
Shreya
-
Soni Darshan
-
Trisha Tomy
-
Chhavi Nain
-
Harsh Khatri
-
Jiya
-
Jyotika
-
Maitri
-
Manjusha Iyer
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.-
He shared an article about a Buffer Overflow Attack that can take place using some of the aforementioned String functions.
-
Explanation of Buffer Overlfow: strings in C are getting people HACKED
-
Demonstration of a Buffer Overflow Attack: exploiting a CRITICAL flaw in my server
-
-
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
Darshan Rander and Kartik Soneji suggested building his idea over SSH, as it is already an industry standard.
-
Project Showcased
-
Darshan Rander showcased an update to Heartry where he migrated the app from Material 2 to Material 3.
OTC CatchUp #111
Date: 24-12-2022
Duration: 5 hrs 32 mins
Topics Discussed
-
We held our first OTC Talks session with Rishit Dagli giving a talk on 'Supercharge your deployments with WASM'.
-
The excellent talk led to an excellent discussion on Operating Systems (OSs), Processors, Virtual Machines (VMs) and hardware in general. Some of the things we talked about are listed in points below.
-
-
Anil Harwani talked about how Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compilation can have security implications on the client, because although storage and network is monitored, compute access is allowed, so Cryptocurrency mining can be done.
-
Anil Harwani told us to think about the scale of an application before thinking about Kubernetes (K8s) and things which have elaborate pipelines.
-
K8s is usually required only for applications that have to handle a lot of network traffic and thus have to load balance the traffic and/or auto-scale the number of servers required depending on the load.
-
To figure out scale, Anil told us to calculate the data flow (bandwidth) required for the application using the following steps
-
For every request and/or action, figure out how much bandwidth is required.
-
An action can consist of multiple requests on the front end and/or back end.
-
-
Calculate how many requests might be required per action and how many actions can be executed by a user.
-
Then multiply that with the number of concurrent users expected.
-
Then add monitoring, logging and other overhead costs to get an accurate account of the resources required.
-
-
-
Anil Harwani said that he really sees WASM being used for compute-intensive tasks on the client, like audio-intensive web apps.
-
Anil Harwani introduced us to
objdump
, a Linux command line utility that displays raw Assembly Opcodes/instructions that are executed when a particular action has to be carried out for a program. -
Operating Systems (OSs) and Central Processing Units (CPUs)
-
Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) vs Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC)
-
Rishit Dagli showed us the Protection Rings in Linux during his talk and Anil Harwani told us about System Calls (
syscalls
) and the need for User Mode and Kernel Mode to be able to improve security, crash handling and minimize the number of CPU interrupts and disk I/Os.-
In the same vein, Anil told us how Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) which are suites of User Mode drivers and software that were created to reduce network packet processing delays and reduce the delay in storing data to disk respectively.
-
-
Anil talked about the AMD 'Zen 3' Core Architecture. (Image)
-
He also talked Feedback Driven Optimization (FDO) here.
-
-
Anil told us about the Row Hammer exploit.
-
-
We talked about how Garbage Collectors work.
-
Lichess also had some Garbage Collection-related issues.
-
Rishit Dagli shared Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning
-
Jay Kaku shared an extremely relevant article on MS/Ph.D. interviews on Computer Systems and the Sorry State of Computer Systems Education in India.
-
In the same vein, Prof. E. W. Dijkstra imparted some good principles in Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering.
-
OTC CatchUp #110
Date: 17-12-2022
Duration: 4 hrs 24 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General Introductions.
-
Rishit Dagli spoke about Stable Diffusion.
-
Rishit Dagli also spoke about WASI - The WebAssembly System Interface.
-
Dheeraj Lalwani asked what does it mean to run an application or a server "as a service" and how to restart a Node.js server which is running as a process.
-
Jaden Furtado replied that it is used to make the servers run as a background process and to avoid deadlocks.
-
PM2 - A process manager for Node.js - PM2 is a daemon process manager that will help you manage and keep your application online.
-
Command to restart a service:
pm2 restart <application name>
-
-
Mohit Shetty spoke about his company’s plan for secure phones.
-
Darshan Rander suggested that they also take into consideration hardware level security.
-
Darshan Rander suggested that the issue is getting requests on an Android Device
-
Jaden Furtado shared a news article Smartphone security hole: 'Open port' backdoors are widespread.
-
-
Darshan Rander shared an interesting tweet by Roman Jaquez which showcases Flutter apps being run on various "unconventional" displays.
-
Pratik Thakare spoke about Tunneling.
-
We helped Viranchee Lotia with some Docker config.
-
Pratik Thakare spoke about Rate Limiter on Load Balancer.
-
We talked about why we should learn networking.
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.
-
He also said that he wrote the privacy policy statement for his project blurrit using ChatGPT.
-
-
-
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.
-
CSS Tutorial - Zero to Hero (Complete Course) by freecodecamp.
-
Coding Challenges playlist by thenetninja.
-
-
Darshan Rander shared an article about Dart Beta 3 release.
-
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.
-
For more context check this part of the 89th CatchUp Summary.
-
-
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
-
Harsh Kapadia showcased his rendition and Performance Comparison of TCP Versions.
-
The project is about learning and comparing how different TCP versions respond to network congestion, and about comparing how fair different TCP versions are to each other.
-
Hosted link for his notes.
-
-
Tushar Nankani showcased void in the wild.
-
Tushar Nankani also showcased his Chrome Extension, blurrit.
-
Chiranjeev Srivastava showcased improvements in his Personal Portfolio.
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.
-
You can submit your talk at talks.ourtech.community/cfp
-
-
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
-
Tushar Nankani showcased two of his projects he made while experimenting with web animations —
-
Jaden Furtado showcased a project where he was making an image with radiowaves, for more information.
Attendees
-
Abhishek Gaud
-
Anil Harwani
-
Atharva Jadhav
-
D.B. Cooper
-
Dipesh Todi
-
Simran Yelave
-
Gaurav Vaishya
-
Harshit Raheja
-
Harshvardhan Patil
-
Hiten Gerella
-
Jainam Jagani
-
Jiya Jagiasi
-
Keval Majithia
-
Namit Gandhi
-
Jia Harisinghani
-
Saachi Kokate
-
Sagar Agicha
-
Shravanesh Mestry
-
Suchit Jagiasi
-
Varun Singh
-
Yash Pimple
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.
-
Ishan Sharma shared how he can use VNC to run GUI apps.
-
-
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.
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.
-
They took reference from Tushar’s WhatsApp chat analysis project.
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
One needs to set up accounts on Fosstodon and Social.tchncs.de to get the full experience of Mastodon.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
Pranav Dani shared a Telnet command for Star Wars in cmd.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
Article links for "Twisted" and the first installment:
-
Ramyak Mehra and Pranav Dani talked about the correlation between cores and threads. For instance, a 4-core 8-thread processor has 4 physical cores and each core can run 2 threads in parallel.
-
We discussed the difference between Concurrency and Parallelism and why using them interchangeably is wrong.
-
Concurrency is the composition of independently executing processes.
-
Parallelism is the simultaneous execution of multiple (possibly related) processes.
-
-
Ramyak Mehra shared a video about Async I/O in Depth
-
-
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.
-
Ramyak Mehra shared HTTP/1.1 benchmarking tool to better benchmark server in a range of load on it.
-
Ramyak Mehra shared that he would like to give a talk about how to approach a new codebase.
-
-
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.
-
Vatsal Patel shared some strategies and insisted on getting the theory right.
-
Vatsal Patel shared a resource on finding patterns in coding problems.
-
Sreekaran Srinath insisted to keep having fun in the process and focusing on problem-solving.
-
-
We discussed how we can find some good tech discussions and take value from these perspectives on Twitter.
-
Tushar Nankani pointed out how we can leverage Tech Twitter and what we see on our "feed" is not the Tech Twitter. He mentioned that he uses Twitter in chronological order of the specific people for whom the notifications are turned on. "Doesn’t let the algorithm fool you."
-
Aditya Oberai and Tushar Nankani shared a few recommendations for whom the notifications should be turned on:
-
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).
-
Project Demo: Banana Speak
-
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.
-
AbuseIP DB is a DB of IP addresses that have tried to attack a system in the past.
-
Jaden Furtado shared reporting page of AbuseIP DB for addressing Anas’s question.
-
-
Darshan Rander shared his recent contributions to winget-cli and plus_plugins.
-
In the winget-cli he created a spec for a selector while installing a package if there are multiple matches.
-
In the plus_plugins he replaced url_launcher (Flutter plugin) with it’s platform specific versions.
-
-
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
-
Anas Khan, Ninad Naik and Ayesha Nagdawala showcased "Passvault - Password Manager" as password manager made using Java Swing and MySQL.
-
Jaden Furtado showcased geo AbuseIP DB.
-
It is wrapper around AbuseIP DB which helps him to plot IPs into maps using IPlocation
-
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
-
Kartik Soneji showcased his implementation of MST (Minimum Spanning Tree) where he generates MermaidJs code to show his final MST.
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.
-
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.
-
Harsh shared a video that talks about the inefficiencies of TCP in detail by Hussein Nasser - Threads and Connections.
-
-
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.
-
A pictorial representation for yellow books.
-
-
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.
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.
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.
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.
-
CRL - Certificate revocation list checks for the certificate locally and if it exists then it does not make a request.
-
-
-
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.
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.
-
Darshan Rander asked why they used kotlin for backend.
-
Saurabh Suryan suggested that they might use it due to its simplicity and interoperability with Java.
-
-
Jaden Furtado shared his experience of working with an OSS contribution (GitHub issue) where they suggested him to use Ktor.
-
-
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.
-
Dhiraj Chauhan talked more about proof of stake, proof of history.
-
Saifuddin Saifee said that it might sound similar to how GitHub works.
-
-
We also talked about what hostile takover is and how UPI works.
-
-
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.
OTC CatchUp #96
😉 !eciN
Date: 10-09-2022
Duration: 6 hrs 35 mins
Topics Discussed
-
General Introductions
-
Harsh Kapadia asked Jignesh Kagadada about his work at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co..
-
Darshan Rander asked Jignesh Kagadada if J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. maintained their versions of frameworks or SDKs like UBS does, to which Jignesh replied that they do maintain a wrapper around the frameworks that JPMC specifically uses.
-
-
Rishit Dagli shared that he is in the organizing team of GitHub Field Day Canada.
-
Rishit Dagli shared that his current aim is to focus and build more around AI/ML with Kubernetes.
-
Rishit Dagli explained why he is not using Docker runtime as it is very heavy and even Kubernetes deprecated dockershim(Docker runtime engine) in 2021.
-
Also Docker is not an OCI (Open Container Initiative) compliant.
-
Rishit Dagli suggested to use podman or containerd instead Docker.
-
You can still use Docker images in the above-mentioned options.
-
-
Himanshu Sharma asked how he can cache Flutter image for GitHub actions.
-
Rishit Dagli explained how he can cache the image using GitHub actions and verify it with checksums.
-
Currently in GitHub actions for Flutter pull everything and then execute our commands.
-
-
Dheeraj Lalwani asked for better alternatives to host his older projects since many of them were currently hosted on Heroku and recently it has announced that it will end the free tier for all users.
-
Darshan Rander suggested railway.app and fly.io
-
Rishit Dagli suggested trying Civo
-
-
Harsh Kapadia asked a question about regulations across borders.
-
The question "If company A is in the country in B, which operates in country C and gets hacked from country D. In which country should they file complain?"
-
Kaustubh Khavnekar said generally companies have data in the country of their operation.
-
-
Harsh Kapadia asked Rishit Dagli how he found professors in Canada.
-
Rishit Dagli said he found a few of them while he was looking at the research and a few while reading the bio on the university site.
-
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'.
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.
-
Darshan Rander suggested him to use webp images instead of PNG since it is also supported by Flutter (Google’s unofficial solution to PNG is webp images).
-
Rishit Dagli suggested multiple libraries for image loading in applications that use Flutter or Kotlin.
-
Sanni Prasad talked about what ZestMoney is and how it works. It is a consumer lending fintech company.
-
He also shared how Indian government bars loading credit lines on prepaid eWallets.
-
-
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.-
Darshan Rander shared an answer from StackOverflow which addressed the issue of date format.
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
Jaden Furtado and Hardik Raheja showcased RASHI - a payment app for in-person offline payments.
-
The application uses Wifi Direct to find nearby devices.
-
The frontend for was built using React Native.
-
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.
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Darshan Rander shared that most domains ending with
ml
,fr
ortk
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.
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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.
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Dhiraj Chauhan and Pranav Dani talked about how one might want to approach making a project.
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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.
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Sahil Prasad shared an article about a teenager who tracks jets of multiple people using the Open Sourced data about flights.
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Sahil Prasad shared that his first PR was merged.
Projects Showcased
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Dhiraj Chauhan showcased his hackathon project Solana Funding Initiative, a Web3 project for building a marketplace that builders can host grants that anyone in the community can contribute to using PDAs.
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The project is built using Next.js, TypeScript, Rust and CSS.
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OTC CatchUp #93
Date: 20-08-2022
Duration: 5 hrs 20 mins
Topics Discussed
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General Introductions.
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Ronit Malhotra shared that he started with Web Development recently with the help of a YouTube Channel called Programming with Mosh.
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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.
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Himanshu Sharma shared his work experience that he was fixing issues that were not in accordance with his job description.
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Tushar Nankani talked about issues that could affect the flow a project.
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Lack of accountability and sense of responsibility among multiple teams and its members causes communication issues.
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Jai Dewani suggested that sharing phone numbers to higher authorities could enervate one’s time since they might call at odd times.
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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.
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He also talked about the Game of Life, a game that he built using Java while following the book.
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Rishit Dagli shared that he recently became a member of the Kubernetes organisation.
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Jaden Furtado shared his Medium article about the vulnerability that he found in Townscript’s website. Nullcon is Asia’s largest international security conference.
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Ishwar Gowda shared how he wrote a Compiler Jack using logic gates by following a book called The Elements of Computing Systems.
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Rishit Dagli shared how eBPF could help in writing compilers.
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Ayush Chauhan shared that even Solana uses eBPF.
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Dheeraj Lalwani asked for resources regarding realtime collaborative software that make use of operational transform.
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Rishit Dagli shared Google Cloud Pub/Sub for realtime collaborative software.
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Ayush Chauhan suggested using Kafka for realtime collaboration.
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Ishan Sharma shared an Open Source project made by one of his friends that demonstrates How Operational Transformation works.
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Dheeraj Lalwani suggested some improvements such as editable titles and variable font weight in HackerResume, a project that Ishan Sharma helped building at Hackerrank.
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We talked about community events and the discussions that were recently took place in Bangalore.
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Pranav Dani talked about Android 13 Tiramisu and the changes that it brings over Android 12L.
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Android 12 was a major design overhaul which introduced Material You theming.
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Android 13 brings stability and some incremental improvements over Android 12L.
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We talked about multiple tools like Obsidian and Notion that one might use to record any information that they came across.
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We also talked about the concept of a Second Brain by leveraging the note-taking tools.
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Gitpod will soon support android development through an emulator online.
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Ishan Sharma shared how he encountered the idea of working on HackerResume.
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A standardised resumé might help recruiters in segregating the required candidates.
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Overleaf provides a good template for a resumé but the only limitation is that it’s not beginner friendly.
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He shared how HackerResume was migrated from Firebase to PostgreSQL.
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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.
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Rishit Dagli shared his experience of becoming a GitHub campus expert at the GitHub Field Day, where he had his in person on boarding.
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Ishan Sharma shared his talk about Web Animations.
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Rishit Dagli shared his talk about WebAssembly.
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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.
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Krishna Gadia talked about his experience as a product manager at gupshup.
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He also talked about gupshup as a product.
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Projects Showcased
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Rishit Dagli showcased a PR that he made to Civo.
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This PR makes installation of KubeFlow easier.
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Rishit Dagli showcased the integration of his MobileNetV3 models into Keras CV.
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Rishit Dagli showcased the implementation of the Nystromformer paper.
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It is a transformer variant that uses Nystrom method to approximate standard self-attention allowing for better scalability.
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Rishit Dagli-dagli/Nystromformer[GitHub Repository^]
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OTC CatchUp #92
Date: 13-08-2022
Duration: 7 hrs 20 mins
Topics Discussed
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Ramyak Mehra shared that he is a part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2022.
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He talked about his task of adding VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) support for ARM devices since currently x86 based devices are supported.
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We talked about BitTorrent parser and ways in which it could be built.
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Aditya Oberai shared his article How Can DevRel Enable Engineering?.
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He also shared that he will discuss about serverless tech in a talk. (Event link)
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We discussed some features of .NET MAUI, the successor of Xamarin.
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We talked about Expo, a React Native library which allows updates to apps using it without requiring app stores.
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Flutter had a similar feature, but it was dropped since it was difficult to maintain. (GitHub issue)
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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.
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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.
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We talked about the learning curve of a Developer in a company and how can one recognize where the curve gets flat.
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When things start getting repetitive and redundant, that’s when the learning curve gets flat.
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Aditya Oberai talked about how a mock design helps in clearly visualising a project and also increases efficiency.
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Ayush Chauhan talked about how Tornado Cash was used for money laundering.
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Crypto mixing service Tornado Cash blacklisted by Treasury Department for alleged use in laundering
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Just like Tornado Cash cannot be taken off the internet, The Pirate Bay cannot be removed as well.
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VLC Media Player is now banned in India.
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India is banning services without proper justification which is inconvenient for many people.
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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.
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We discussed the Purchase Power Parity and how it affects the prices of OTT service plans and online courses.
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Harsh Kapadia suggested Namaste JavaScript as a good resource for understanding JavaScript fundamentals.
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Aditya Oberai shared Arpit Bhayani’s channel for learning about back end technologies.
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Harsh Kapadia mentioned other YouTubers such as Hussein Nasser and Gaurav Sen.
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Aditya Oberai and Harsh Kapadia talked about Dev Advocacy and how it affects taking decisions.
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We talked about internships and how one can get them.
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Harsh Kapadia asked whether jobs that involve a lot of innovation (like research positions) face massive layoffs before/during an economic recession.
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It depends on the industry, company and how integral research is for the company.
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A company whose core is research, will not let go of its core research department.
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It also depends on the profitability of the company, the number of employees it has, its expenditure, funding, etc.
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Thus, it is extremely important to do one’s due diligence before joining or applying to a company.
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How does one research about a company?
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Go through the company’s site to see what they do. Read blogs and articles to get a deeper understanding.
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Go through employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor, Blind, etc.
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Talk to ex-employees.
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Ask the interviewer questions.
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Get a legal overview of the offer letter and one should themselves read it thoroughly as well.
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Look into the profitability, funding and Burn Rate of the company.
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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.
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How should choose between a MNC corporate job vs a job at a startup?
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This is a debate between risk and growth.
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It mainly depends on one’s risk-taking capacity.
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It is easier to experiment without repercussions at an earlier stage in one’s career and coming from a privileged background also helps.
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Ideally one should look to maximize growth at earlier stages in their career.
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How can one figure out whether they will grow at an organisation?
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Check whether their product and audience is growing.
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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.
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It is good if a company or product has started to scale up, because scaling up bring its own interesting problems.
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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.
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This balance can be tipped on either side depending on one’s risk-taking capacity, career stage and monetary background.
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Ayush Chauhan talked about Superteam DAO.
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Darshan Rander shared a Tweet thread How do I add Material 3 custom colors and harmonize them in Flutter?.
Projects Showcased
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Darshan Rander showcased the MVP of MusiShare, his Jetpack Compose Android app to solve the problem of sharing music between multiple music streaming platforms.
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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.
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Aditya Oberai suggested checking Shazam since it provides a similar service.
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OTC CatchUp #91
Date: 06-08-2022
Duration: 4 hrs 30 mins
Topics Discussed
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General Introductions
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As Nidhi Kadam was learning about Computational Neuroscience we discussed about its current state and the future prospects.
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Himanshu Sharma shared his plans to write an article on How to do Flutter CI with GitHub actions.
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We also asked Himanshu Sharma about his future career plans.
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Jaden Furtado shared his article -