OTC CatchUp #61 Summary

About OTC CatchUp

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 #61

Date: 08-01-2022

Duration: 14 hrs 5 mins

Topics Discussed

General introductions.
We discussed how easy Razorpay has made integrating their payment gateway into a website and Jaden Furtado told everyone how he found a vulnerability in a website because of some misconfiguration while integrating the Razorpay payment gateway, which allowed him to intercept requests from the client and buy the product for any price he chose.
Scaling resources
- We talked about autoscaling, which is a Cloud Computing technique for dynamically allocating or de-allocating computational resources depending on parameters such as memory usage, network bandwidth, etc.
- Omkar Khair shared his blog on Autoscale Optimizations.
- Anil Harwani and Omkar Khair discussed scaling.\
- Anil Harwani modeled the network cost of a single instance of an application and illustrated how it can bring down servers. He added that a lot of companies forget to measure this and only depend on CPU utilization of servers to auto scale.
We also talked about Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).
Anil Harwani talked about two kinds of design phases DFT (Design for Test) & DFD (Design for Debug) while designing Microprocessors.
Anil Harwani suggested everyone to dig deeper into the infrastructure and to not just think about hardware from a Software Developer’s perspective while building projects.
Anil Harwani shared an article Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years and said that he was a firm believer of it.
Anil Harwani also shared a meme on How to Teach Yourself Programming.
Thinking before building
- Anil Harwani brought out the difference between building software when one is starting out and when one has grown a bit or is working in a professional environment.
  - When starting out, one should build projects to gain experience and solve certain problems that one might be facing. Once someone has grown considerably or is working in a professional environment, they should really think before just starting to build. They should access whether the product/solution proposed is even necessary or not. He said that a lot of people today are just coming up with solutions (and that too in a hurry) and aren’t thinking about the problem enough.
- Sreekaran Srinath shared a Twitter Thread on how Uber faced a lot of difficulties due to over-engineering and hyper growth.
We talked about how different people perceive Social Media differently and extract different value from it.
Amul Badjatya shared his twitter thread on Twitter growth.
Hardik Raheja shared an article, What is a System Management Unit?
Jay Kaku asked how to apply learnt knowledge, especially in hardware.
Processors
- We had a discussion on performance comparison of M1 and x86 processors.
- We also discussed how much power the M1 processor draws in it’s active and passive states and compared that with x86.
- Anil Harwani shared a GitHub Gist on Latency numbers every programmer should know.
- We discussed about Temporal Locality and Locality of Reference.
- Anil Harwani shared an article on 3D V-cache coming to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor.
We talked about Unified memory and how are SSDs fast.
Sreekaran Srinath told us how inefficient Jira has been for him and how he automated it.
Sreekaran Srinath talked about how Airtel was blocking certain domains using GitHub Pages without a court order. Someone wrote an open letter to Cloudflare on the issue as well, because Airtel is their vendor. Previously referenced by Sreekaran Srinath in CatchUp 55 as issues with loading GitHub Pages sites.
We discussed about the Faker.js fiasco. It’s a murky situation and no one knows what to say. A video on The Dark Side of Open Source // What really happened to Faker.js? gives some details on the situation.
Unreal Engine
- Rishit Dagli asked if anyone had experience with Game Dev and the Unreal Engine.
- The Matrix Awakens - An Unreal Engine 5 Experience
Sreekaran Srinath reiterated Amit Choudhary’s 'Fastest String Search Algorithm' debacle.
Dheeraj Lalwani, Kartik Soneji and Sreekaran Srinath had an extensive discussion on healthy eating habits, weight loss and nutritional content of various everyday foods.
Kartik Soneji reverse engineered Twitter Spaces and helped Sreekaran Srinath download the whole voice recording of a particular space with the help of the browser DevTools and FFmpeg.

Projects Showcased

Rishit Dagli shared his project which is an implementation of Conformer, a Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition and a Transformer Variant in TensorFlow and Keras.
Ritvi Mishra shared her experiences working at a commission studio for Engineering projects where she helped in building a smart Hookah and talked about using STM32 MCUs and STM32CubeIDE in the process.
Saurabh Suryan shared his Twitter Wrapped project, which was a work in progress.

Attendees

Meet Screenshot

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