About OTC CatchUp

Note OTC CatchUps are weekly informal sessions involving project showcases and technical discussions. They are held every Saturday from 10:30 PM IST. Join in!.
For all summaries, please visit catchup.ourtech.community/summary.

OTC CatchUp #274

Authors: Alpesh Bhagwatkar · Ankush Kapoor

Date: 07-02-2026

Duration: 1 hr 04 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Round of introductions took place with participants sharing their backgrounds and current work.

  • Darshan Rander showcased his portfolio AI chatbot project that uses RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to answer questions about himself.

    • The project scrapes data from his resume, blogs, and portfolio site to provide contextual responses.

    • He implemented a custom caching mechanism where AI responses are vectorized and stored, allowing for cache hits on similar queries (80% similarity threshold).

    • Discussion on cache invalidation strategies when source documents are updated.

    • Frontend was generated using OpenAI Codex.

  • Discussion on various LinkedIn scrapers and the ethics of scraping.

  • Bhavesh Kukreja discussed two project ideas he’s considering.

    • Building a local RAG system with SLMs (Small Language Models) using Ollama for web search capabilities without relying on paid APIs.

    • A shopkeeper simulation game inspired by "Good Pizza, Great Pizza" with a plot about an unplaced engineer opening a general store.

  • Discussion on AI coding tools comparing OpenAI Codex, Claude with Copilot extension, and others.

    • Participants agreed that Claude’s Copilot extension provides the best code quality with minimal tokens.

  • Alpesh Bhagwatkar shared updates on his activities.

    • His startup Identity Shield won an award at Sandbox Innovation in Pune.

    • Won a CTF competition at RAIT University.

    • Currently studying for CJPT and CPTS (Certified Penetration Testing Specialist) certifications from Hack The Box.

Additional Resources

Attendees

  1. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  2. Bhavesh Kukreja

  3. Jaden Furtado

  4. Mohit Gangwani

  5. Rishit Dagli

  6. Wilfred Almeida

  7. Darshan Rander

  8. Mohit Gangwani

  9. Anuj Gupta

  10. Mridun Gupta

  11. Saee Nalawade

  12. Vishal Singh Saini

  13. Ayush Shukla

  14. Kaushal Patil

  15. Mohammad Kaif

  16. Rishi Setpal

  17. Sanam Bhatia

  18. Vikas Singh

Meet Screenshot

Meet #274 screenshot
Note For all summaries, please visit catchup.ourtech.community/summary.

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