OTC CatchUp #125 Summary

General introductions.

Harsh Kapadia gave a brief of the week’s tech news.

Harsh Kapadia and Rishit Dagli shared a few funny Pull Requests (PRs) from the twitter/the-algorithm repository.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.