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 #69

Nice! 😉

Date: 05-03-2022

Duration: 7 hrs 25 mins

Topics Discussed

  • General introductions.

  • Aditya Oberai shared a link to how one can detect a click event inside an iframe.

  • Sanni Prasad told us how he transitioned from Xamarin to Flutter for building cross-platform mobile apps.

  • Aditya Oberai informed us that .NET MAUI is the successor of Xamarin.

  • Aditya Oberai also told us that Anders Hejlsberg is the core developer of TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal.

  • Aditya Oberai shared Becoming a Better Developer Through Open-Source.

  • Material Design

  • Points that should be covered in cover letters for job applications

    • Why me?

    • Why am I looking at this company?

    • Optional: Background

      • How one started with something that is VERY relevant to the company?

    • Optional: Why is the company great?

      • Do not write too much on this, employees know why their company is great.

  • How to talk about personal experiences relevant to the job without oversharing/crossing the boundaries.

    • The way to understand which personal experience matters would be to check the values of the company.

    • To understand when to share various personal experiences, one should know the interviewer’s or founder’s backstory which might indicate the type of experiences they might be open to.

  • We talked about how people/organisations/companies who sponsor OSS maintainers don’t have the right to dictate that Open Source project’s direction or ask for personal attention from the maintainer. (Context)

  • Meta and Metaverse

  • Anil Harwani told us about the working cultures at various companies and also told us how some companies have processes that force hiring idiots.

  • Anil Harwani talked about abstraction and gave us a few wonderful quotes.

The dumber you are, the higher you go [in abstraction].
— Anil Harwani
You rise up to your incompetence.
— Anil Harwani
  • We talked about Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS).

  • Shrinath Gupta asked how he could make his team follow best practices when not being in a leadership position. People told him that he could try to make his teammates understand, but it would be very difficult, as not everyone is equally passionate and/or caring about things and don’t want to go the extra mile for a fixed salary. Not being in a commanding position makes it even more difficult. He was advised to maintain a code standard for himself and eventually leave the company if the code standards were very bad and things don’t improve at all.

    • Omkar Khair gave a good piece of advice here. He said that 90% people are very limited in what they do or don’t do anything. It is up to us to find the 10% people who do actual work and build a network with them.

    • Omkar also said that in trying to resolve issues at work, one should not lose sight of technical correctness and one’s code standard, because if everyone jumps off a cliff, you don’t need to as well.

  • Anil Harwani talked about Tridactyl, a Vim-like interface for Firefox.

  • Comparing Technologies

    • We talked about how media articles influence people’s minds about different Technology and rather than comparing individual use cases, they make a blanket statement (Eg: Calling one processor just better than the other for all use cases) and influence the common masses.

    • As per Anil Harwani, x86 and ARM processors shouldn’t be compared, because the use cases and workloads are different.

    • How Apple lied about their custom NVMe drives was discussed as well.

  • Power states and power models in computers.

  • Omkar Khair and Anil Harwani discussed the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

  • A standup bit on how Bill Burr destroyed Steve Jobs was shared.

  • Branch Prediction

  • Darshan Rander shared his experience interviewing for an internship at UBS.

Projects Showcased

  • Jay Kaku showcased the processor design for a Four Stage Pipelined RV32i Core that he built using TL-Verilog while following course material.

    • Course: RISC-V based Microprocessor for You in Thirty Hours (MYTH)

    • Processor features

    • GitHub repository

      • The README.md in the repository has a lot of the necessary explanations.

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

Meet Screenshot

Meet #69 screenshot

Special 69th CatchUp poster

69th CatchUp special poster

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

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We rise by lifting others.
— Robert Ingersoll
Kindness always wins.
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Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
— Helen Keller