OTC CatchUp #63 Summary

General introductions.

Competitive Programming (CP) and Development: What should be done depends on what one wants to do. If placements is the goal, CP should be stressed upon and one should have some projects. If higher studies is the goal, then Development and research/developing proficiency in the domain of interest is more important.

We talked about the bad UX of the Microsoft Teams desktop app.

Rishit Dagli shared his newsletter which is going to be about Tech and Artificial Intelligence. People can approach him to feature their projects as well!

Chirag Nayyar and Anil Harwani told everyone, how important and expensive data bandwidth is and how important it is to measure it.

Chirag Nayyar also shared how useful the Oracle Cloud Free Tier is and suggested using it to learn and explore the technology.

Omkar Khair explained the recent 'race condition enabling symlink following' vulnerability in Rust, which can be used to trick a privileged program into deleting files and directories the attacker couldn’t otherwise access or delete.

We also talked about Anaconda, a system installer for Linux distributions.

We talked about NVM (Node Version Manager), which manages multiple active Node.js versions on a computer.

Anil Harwani suggested installing Slackware Linux if one wants to configure a lot of options and build all programs (Eg: Python) from their binaries to learn more.

We talked about Cloudflare and Edge Computing.

Anil Harwani shared Serve the Home with everyone to keep up with server hardware and even Cloud VM performance.

Rishit Dagli shared his talk Superpower Your Android Apps with ML: Android 11.

Mihika Gaonkar asked Dheeraj Lalwani about sending data to the backend from the frontend without refreshing the page in a Django project. Dheeraj suggested using the Fetch API.

Anil Harwani asked if anyone was aware of benchmarking (performance and hardware profiling).

Anil Harwani shared an article Growing compute by scaling up and scaling out by IBM.

Anil Harwani shared a few talks on hardware

Anil Harwani explained why Indian data centers don’t have good GPUs.

Sreekaran Srinath shared his experience while being a Teaching Assistant at Harvard CS50.

Rishit Dagli discussed an issue he was facing while adding a SSL Certificate to his newsletter.

Darshan Rander showcased a website he had made using GSAP for his parent’s wedding anniversary.

Dheeraj Lalwani showcased Back to Work, a web-extension trying to fix a problem in the productivity domain.

Tushar Nankani showcased Aankh, a web app for effortless automatic proctoring of online tests.

Harsh Kapadia showcased Git Graph, a visualizer for the Directed Acyclic Graph that Git creates to connect Commit, Tree and Blob objects internally.