OTC CatchUp #132 Summary

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OTC CatchUps are weekly informal sessions involving project showcases and technical discussions. They are held every Saturday from 10:30 PM IST. Join in!.
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OTC CatchUp #132

Date: 20-05-2023

Duration: 4 hrs

Topics Discussed

Saurabh Daware and Pranav Dani distilled different types of jobs available based on need and skills.
- We discussed the specifics of different domains like cloud, frontend, and backend.
  - There’s no right time to make a switch in job roles.
  - Changing roles can help prevent mental stagnation.
- Darshit Suratwala talked about how banks work on different projects.
Saurabh Daware shared how his team works with the frontend by creating and maintaining React libraries for the organization.
We discussed potential improvements and similar implementations for Vaulter — A WIP project by Dheeraj Lalwani and Chirag Lulla.
- Darshit Suratwala said that in the case of GCP, the libraries support chunked uploads and the user can avoid the server and directly upload in the bucket.
- They discussed the Samba server and FTP implementations.
- Anil Harwani talked about how file chunks are processed and saved in a drive.
  - How does block storage ensure that you never lose data? Is it storing all the data in one single hard drive?
    
    Many cases implement sequential file chunking and saving.
    
    Either store the data in a single hard drive or save multiple copies of it across multiple hard drives.
    
    If stored on a single drive, chances of failure are high, so instead of that store it in multiple 1 GB chunks and create a hash function for addressing.
    
    Every 1 gig chunk can have a parity algorithm to check the consistency of the data.
    
    Check parity between each chunk and store it across multiple drives.
  - The working is similar to RAID storage.
    
    Each system has a fault tolerance limit for drive failure.
  - Metadata databases require high read speeds because a delay in response from the metadata database can lead to a ripple of delays in subsequent calls for file chunks/blocks from the block storage.
  - This leads to poor performance, eventually causing poor user experience.
    
    Differences in latency in the hierarchy of storage from the CPU cache to the hard drive range from nanoseconds to milliseconds.
- How will the self-hosting happen?
  - The idea is to create a simple executable for users to run on their server of choice.
    
    Saurabh Daware suggested that he should first get the bare bones ready and then scale up from there.
    
    By this time, work on optimizing the system and working on edge cases.
- GCP Storage Browser and Filebox have similar implementations.
We discussed some struggles of students living abroad.
- 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.
  - Division Algorithm
  - why are computers horrible at division? (a painful discovery) - a video by Low Level Learning.
Nothing has a collaboration with teenage engineering for their products.
Touch typing can be helpful for easily and optimally typing on keyboards.
- Most people can learn touch typing within 1 month if they had some experience with using musical instruments since that involves using multiple fingers simultaneously.
Aditya Oberai and Darshit Suratwala talked about potential MITM (Man in the Middle) attacks using Wireshark.
- Wireshark is a packet analyzer that can be used to analyze network traffic, but most of the times the data is encrypted and hence it cannot alter requests with positive outcomes.
- ISPs use similar ways to analyze traffic.

Projects Showcased

Dheeraj Lalwani shared his progress on Vaulter, a self-hosted storage server.
- It is a simple file-sharing and self-hosted storage server, inspired by an open-source web-based collection server and streamer, Navidrome that he had earlier worked with.
- GitHub Repository

Attendees

Meet Screenshot

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