114th Monthly Technical Session
On January 26, 2024, we have our first Monthly Technical Session (MTS) in 2024! This time, our MC, Kodama, introduced four new Global Internship Program (GIP) interns and two new HENNGE members. Kodama then explained the timetable and guidelines for the MTS. In this MTS, we talked about Keycloak, Metaverse, State of Auth, Meetup @ HENNGE, Exploring RDS, and Generative AI.
Let’s get started!
Keycloak by Ihsan
The first talk was about Keycloak by Ihsan, one of our GIP interns. Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management. He introduced new terminologies: realm (world / domain) and client (interface between Keycloak and the application). How Keycloak works is that an application should define the realm, provision the users, and define the client, and then it is possible to secure applications using it.
Ihsan then proceeded to demonstrate how Keycloak works in a web application, how to secure Node.js applications with this technology, and elaborated about more in-depth features of Keycloak, such as Single-Sign On, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) & Active Directory, Themes, and many more.
Metaverse by Dion
The second talk was about Metaverse by Dion, also one of our GIP interns. Dion began the presentation by showing a representation of Metaverse that simulates Harajuku shopping street. Technically, Metaverse is an interesting concept: an interconnected digital universe, merging augmented reality and virtual reality with real-world elements. Metaverse is supposed to be boundless, immersive, persistent, decentralized, and economic (with virtual cryptocurrencies). It is possible to access Metaverse with two ways: virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
Dion then proceeded to show examples of Metaverse applications for connection, education, work, and entertainment (games). Even though the hype for the Metaverse has died down, there is still a future for Metaverse, which is the integration of Artificial Intelligence (to provide dynamic and customized user experiences) and the development of Virtual / Augmented Reality headsets. Dion then explained the future technologies to accommodate Metaverse: AR-powered sunglasses and Apple Vision Pro (an AR-powered headset) to visualize applications in the physical environment.
As a closing to the talk, Dion demonstrated a Metaverse application in front of the audience.
State of Auth by Krizza
Krizza talked about the state of current authentication, one of them is with the passwordless authentication. Krizza began the talk by telling a story about her experience participating in a Hackathon in October 2023, which introduced Krizza to passwordless authentication and provided inspiration for this talk. She then proceeded to provide a brief history about authentication, from username and password combo (which is the weakest one and is the cause of 80% of data breaches), single-sign on, to passwordless authentication, some examples are magic links, device authentication, and passkeys.
Passkey is an automatically generated Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) credential stored in a device, and it is used to unlock online accounts. Krizza proceeded to explain how passkeys work with symmetric and asymmetric encryption and how they authenticate the user with an application that supports passkey authentication. Then, Krizza demonstrated passkey authentication on a website.
Krizza concluded the presentation by telling the audience about the future of authentication, sharing resources about passwordless authentication, and sharing her opinion about the security of passwordless authentication. From her viewpoint, she compared it with password-based systems and it appears to be safer. However, Krizza warned that technically, nothing is perfect, and anything can have a possibility of being hacked.
Meetup @ HENNGE by Charles
Charles talked about his experience of hosting a Meetup event in HENNGE. Charles began the talk by defining a meetup, which is gathering a group of people with similar interests. He then explained how to use tools or sites to advertise the meetup event that would be created and the reasons for using them.
Before creating the meetup event at HENNGE, Charles recommended the audience check the availability and reserve the eleventh floor in HENNGE to be used as the meetup venue and explained to the audience how to do so. He then told us how to properly prepare the venue for the meetup, starting with food (if any), moving furniture, setting up the projector and audio equipment, and placing signage to help people know that this is the location for the meetup event.
Charles then told us about his experiences of hosting three meetups in HENNGE about Mobile Development, most notably the challenges, which consisted of dietary restrictions, people who did not show up or canceled at the last minute, the difficulty of organizing an event by a single person and setting up the equipment. Charles concluded the talk by sharing with the audience regarding the key takeaways from hosting the meetup event.
Exploring RDS Data by Yoel
Yoel turn came next about exploring data from Relational Database Service (RDS), a service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Yoel started the presentation by providing the background of this talk, which is to handle support cases and prevent people from accessing data directly at the production database. The way to do this is to create a read-only copy of the database. He explained the alternative solutions: Read Replica, Glue and Athena, and Database Migration Service in terms of setup, data, cost, and behavior. Yoel chose Glue and Athena for this use-case.
Yoel then explained about the architecture of his use-case, and the process of automating it with crawler and step functions. Some challenges about this use-case are figuring out clanky step functions and working around multiple export results. In the future, he wants to manage exports with S3 and perform more research on Database Migration Services. Yoel concluded the presentation by providing a demo of his use case, and explained about the cost and the duration of one run.
Generative AI by Mark
Mark started the talk by talking about the usage of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) in today’s age and the time taken to reach 100 million users for most applications. ChatGPT surprisingly reaches 100 million users in just 2 months! Mark then explained how Generative AI could be used to democratize creativity in three ways: lowering barriers of entry, improving accessibility, and expanding possibilities.
Mark then explained the origins of Generative AI and how it works behind the scenes. It uses many machine learning algorithms to learn from big amounts of data. Mark then described how Generative AI could be used for each point in democratizing creativity:
- Lowering entry barriers: Allows people to come inside a knowledge domain without spending too much time or resources with AI.
- Improving accessibility: Allows people to regain knowledge or experience new ways with AI.
- Expanding possibilities: Allows people to enhance existing work or ideas with AI.
Mark concluded the presentation with some closing words about the usage of Generative AI.
After this session, as usual, we have the Beer Bash.
