115th Monthly Technical Session
We gathered at the Shibuya office in February for yet another thrilling session of technical topics for MTS #115. A total of 5 Speakers, including two interns joining our Global Internship Program (GIP) were given the spotlight to share with us their various topics of interest.
Let’s recap how the session went!
Computer Graphics — A lightning-fast primer
The first talk of the day was presented by our GIP intern Jack who has a passion for computer graphics and gave us a brief overview of the two main theoretical approaches to rendering 3D scenes; namely Rasterization and Ray Tracing.
Rasterization
This method is traditionally used in real-time rendering applications where emphasis is put on rendering images very quickly, such as video games that require a high frame rate. The main idea behind it is to take an image described in vector graphics format and convert it into a raster image. Even though it’s a technique that is not as modern as its counterpart, it’s still widely used today, even though it struggles with achieving the standard of photorealism that is common nowadays.
Ray Tracing
This method. In contrast, it colors the pixels first and then defines the vector objects to identify them afterward. It is more often used for other rendering applications, such as 3D modeling and animations. Recent advances in computing hardware have reached a point where ray tracing can be performed in real time, leading to a surge of more photorealistic video games.
Hedera Hashgraph/Crypto
Next up was the second intern presentation for the evening by Hayden who gave us an introduction to Hedera Hashgraph a distributed ledger technology that has been described as an alternative to blockchain. It is a high throughput service that utilizes the consensus mechanism based on a “gossip about gossip” protocol to securely spread transaction information and ensure no single point of failure.
He shared his experiences participating in a university hackathon where his group got to build a custom cryptocurrency, ByteBucks, based on Hedera Hashgraph. They set out to create a universal currency that could be earned at other hackathons for attending, participating in workshops, and winning etc, and then later redeemed for various prizes and rewards. Their efforts were rewarded in the end as they walked away with the main prize at the end of the hackathon.
Let’s be a little less bad at statistics together
Jon went on to give a talk regarding his struggles and eventual triumphs over Statistics during his university days and beyond. He reminded us how worthwhile and enjoyable approaching rigorous subjects such as Statistics can feel.
He discussed various challenges with studying Statistics as a field and some tools one can use to make inroads in studies. He introduced the Monte Carlo simulation as one of the tools for modeling probabilities of different outcomes in processes that cannot be easily predicted such as the sum of two rolled dice.
He concluded this talk by showing how even analytical methods like these can have tradeoffs and unintuitive results. In conclusion, he gave an analysis of the famous Birthday Problem and used a Python version of the Monte Carlo simulation to show the interesting result that with only 70 people, you have a 99.9% chance that two random people share the same birthday.
Process in Action: Part 3
Doi-san went on to revisit the challenges of product delivery and the complexities of our business process in his talk. The focus of the talk this time was on “Time to Value” in the specific context of B2B SaaS companies.
He shared about the challenges he’s observed and emphasized the importance of increased collaboration between developers and the Customer Success division for improving product delivery as the company scales.
Programming as Theory Building
The last talk for the evening was from Adie regarding Peter Naur’s essay discussing Programming as Theory Building. He argued that the whole activity of programming should be focused on the process of the team, so as to build the knowledge (theory) of the program, with documentation and the actual code being just an auxiliary part.
He explained the theory of a program lifecycle where a program is considered as dead when the team possessing its theory dissolves. It may still run in this state, but the “dead” state becomes apparent when the demand for modification cannot be answered intelligently. The program may be revived by the new team as the new team reforms the theory (knowledge) of the program.
That’s all for the 115th MTS recap. After finishing the sessions, we enjoyed the beer bash as usual and congratulated another batch of interns on successfully completing their internship!
See you at the next MTS!
