OTC CatchUp #65 Summary

General introductions.

During the project showcase section Anil Harwani rightly mentioned that we should play Lego with software, but we should also understand how the pieces are shaped and what they are made of. Getting into the 'What', 'Why' and 'When' of these libraries and tools is important to grow as an Engineer and build better and more efficient software.

Bloated software

Harsh Kapadia talked about ULTRARAM as an addition to last CatchUp’s talk on DRAMs and SRAMs.

Anil Harwani told us how certain research papers try really hard to come up with catchy names and marketing tactics. He also asked us to question whether those things will be required by the time they have been tested for scale and become mainstream.

We talked about being a Generalist versus a Specialist and Anil Harwani told us that once someone has been in the industry for decades they become a T-shaped person due to their exposure to different things.

Anil Harwani shared an article Exploring SIMD performance improvements in WebAssembly.

We talked about the I²C and I3C protocols.

Vatsal Patel told us how he was using TinyPilot to KVM into machines to remotely run benchmarks and debug systems.

Vatsal Patel helped us compare AMD and Intel processors once again. We talked about AMD client processors such as Ryzen and Threadripper and AMD server boards such as EPYC.

Vatsal Patel also helped us compare AMD, Nvidia and Intel’s graphics cards.

Vatsal Patel made us understand why chips manufactured by TSMC and Samsung are different. Some of the reasons were that the manufacturing processes are different, raw material quality differs, the technology used by the two differs, etc.

Vatsal Patel told us how aware the Marketing department of a company has to be.

Ishan Sharma and Vatsal Patel told us stories of how Microsoft and Apple respectively were very generous in providing replacements when their products got damaged.

Harsh Kapadia told everyone that npm is not an acronym for 'Node Package Manager' and that it should not be written in upper case, as mentioned in npm’s FAQ on branding.

Ishan Sharma at HackerRank

Ishan Sharma told us about a mistake he recently made in production when he got locked out of a Database because he forgot its password. He also walked through the data recovery process.

Ishan Sharma also shared design.ishandeveloper.com where he posts case studies on his product designs.

We compared Apple and Android ecosystems and discussed vendor lock-ins and which ecosystem is more distracting.

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education course was talked about.

Harsh Kapadia explained Cron jobs and Cron syntax.

Vatsal Patel shared 14 Patterns to Ace Any Coding Interview Question.

There was a discussion on whether coding should compulsorily be taught to children and if so, when should it be taught. Vatsal Patel was advocating easing people into it by getting them excited about it.

Kartik Soneji shared his project idea of computers detecting key presses on a table top.

Darshan Rander shared his project idea of summarizing a meet.

The BCM App for Android was talked about.

The revenue model of archive.org was discussed along with the legality of scraping.

Mihika Gaonkar showcased her Data Visualization project OTC Analysis, which is a dashboard created using Power BI for analyzing previous OTC CatchUps.

Chinmay Palav showcased Quiz for Ease, a React.js application for playing quizzes.

Pranil Chitre showcased his productivity app Conquer, which helps one plan tasks and goals by segregating them in daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and long term sections.

Ayush Bhosle showcased SumItUp, an Extractive Summarization project.

Rishit Dagli talked about an update of his project TNT, an implementation of Transformers in Transformers for Image Classification.

Jay Bhavsar showcased CodeVengers Portfolio Page.

Harsh Kapadia talked about Git Internals, a PWA he created using Asciidoctor Jet to collect his Git internals knowledge.