OTC CatchUp #130 Summary

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.

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.

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.