OTC CatchUp #131 Summary

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.

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

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.