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 #311

Authors: Ayush More · Claude Fable 5.1

Date: 24-10-2026

Duration: 2 hrs 58 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Janvi Matani talked about CyberWatch AI, a college mini project that uses a Kaggle network traffic dataset to separate normal traffic from attacks, since normal traffic clusters together when plotted.

  • Alpesh Bhagwatkar talked about the recent eMudhra incident and the likely causes of weak key generation, like type truncation, a malformed seed or bad entropy sourcing, when OpenSSL makes generating random numbers easy.

    • He also showcased his portfolio site with his Hack The Box certifications, which he called the LeetCode equivalent for cybersecurity.

  • Pranav Dani explained his work on Hyper-V at Microsoft.

    • Hyper-V is Microsoft’s hypervisor product, the way ESX is VMware’s. Virtual machines on Windows go through it and Azure runs on it. His work is implementing features and debugging low level OS handling.

  • Raghav Rathi talked about his job on a core Python microservices team with LLM integration, where he works end to end across backend, QA and deployment.

    • He asked how to justify his skills in interviews after 1.5 years of mostly AI-assisted work, since the market for the 2025 batch has fallen. The group suggested side projects and sticking with a company where the work is good.

  • The group debated personal branding on LinkedIn and exaggerated resumes, and whether "fake it till you make it" works when hiring rarely verifies the work.

  • Janvi asked whether first years should still learn syntax when AI writes most of the code.

    • Raghav said to focus on architecture and building projects. Pranav disagreed and said time spent writing and understanding code yourself pays off later.

  • Urmil Saini shared that he is following The Missing Semester of Your CS Education, and that seeing what OTC members do was both exciting and demotivating.

  • Chirag Nayyar, who completes 10 years in his career in November, gave career advice.

    • Do not compare yourself with others, pick one path, and remember that fundamentals like IP subnetting still matter. MLOps is the new name for the deployment work DevOps already did.

    • Most of his job switches came through referrals, not applications, and keeping the customer happy matters more than internal politics, which he learned from Amazon’s leadership principles.

    • C++ and legacy systems like Sun Solaris and SPARC still pay well in telcos and government companies.

  • Raghav shared that he uses Claude Pro and finds Opus the best model for development, research and documentation.

Attendees

  1. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  2. Chirag Nayyar

  3. Pranav Dani

  4. Akash Patil

  5. Janvi Matani

  6. Krupal

  7. Raghav Rathi

  8. Urmil Saini

Meet Screenshot

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Note For all summaries, please visit catchup.ourtech.community/summary.

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