82nd Monthly Technical Session
HENNGE hosts a technical knowledge sharing session each month called the Monthly Technical Session or MTS for short. The 82nd MTS was held on Friday, May 21st, 2021. The COVID-19 situation hasn’t changed much and most of our members are still working from home, hence MTS is held online on Zoom this time as well.
Relationship
MTS 82nd began with a talk about relationships. Kenny belongs to a team called Internal Relations and Communication (IRC). Recently, Kenny starts taking ORSC (Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching) courses to improve his skills in helping others build strong relationships with each other in the company. The course offers a certification program that awards you with the title of ORSC Coach upon completion. He shared some of the key takeaways from attending the first few sections of the course, and encouraged us to reach out to his team if we are interested in learning more.
Comparing Website Builders (Webflow vs Wordpress)
Sebastian shared his experience building his own website using two different website builders, Wordpress and Webflow. Wordpress is open source and very popular and is already being used by many many websites. However, he felt frustrated by Wordpress experience since there are a lot of complexities that need to be managed in every step, whereas his Webflow experience was so smooth. Webflow does have a few disadvantages such as smaller community and less flexibility in hosting options, but he felt the ease of use outweighs those cons. He suggested we give Webflow a try if we’re interested in using a website builder.
Intro into UX Design
Kaoru gives a talk about user experience (UX) design, and how design thinking process could be beneficial to devs as well. She started by debunking some common misconceptions about UX. She proceeded by giving a demo of what a bad UX looks like and how it frustrates its users. In order to achieve good UX, we can use the design thinking process with several steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. Throughout this flow, there will be a lot of iteration and going back and forth to continuously improve on it. Understanding this process would help devs getting to know the users’ thought process when using the product, and helps optimize its product to make it as easy to use for the users as possible.
Hardening Hypervisors against Vulnerabilities in Instruction Emulators
Kenta gave a talk about improving hypervisors’ security against vulnerabilities. Hypervisor is a virtualization platform that is the basis of cloud services, supporting virtual machines that are isolated from one another. Vulnerabilities in a hypervisor could break this isolation and allows a bad actor to access other virtual machines that should’ve been isolated from one another. Kenta’s work introduces the concept of context-sensitive instruction filter (like a firewall) to ensure dangerous instructions are not emulated by the hypervisor.
Things I Learned Organising a Hackathon
Mohita shared her experience organising a Hackathon, which is an on-site competition where teams develop products based on a set idea, usually in 24 hours. They would then present their product to a panel of judges. There were a lot of things to prepare like finding mentors, connecting with alumni, referencing other Hackathons, etc. She then shared the things that went well, things that didn’t quite go as planned, and her main takeaways from the experience.
Renewable Energy Simulation Using Python
Rushi gave a talk about a project he did, which was to calculate the optimal solar panel area and the optimal storage capacity to ensure reliable energy supply for IIT Bombay, given the load data. He explained each step he took to solve the problem from technology selection, PV and Battery state of charge modeling, simulation using Python, and optimizations.
Predicting the Future
Dima started his talk by quoting a prediction made over a century ago about how humans would become slaves to machines. True enough, nowadays we do as machines told us to (e.g. turn by turn directions while driving). We can also see from history that technology seems to continue accelerating faster and faster, but recently we found that technology acceleration plateaus (e.g. new social media are coming in slower and slower). Dima then gives predictions based on past data such as: investing more in software instead of hardware, shorter employment durations, invest in tech that brings improvements to people’s productivity.
GoHunter — Submit Lunch Reports
Michelle gave a quick update about the GoHunter project that she worked on, which is a website for HENNGE employees to get to know a list of restaurants people usually go to for GIP Lunch (Lunch together with on-site interns). She shared a new feature she developed, which is to submit a GIP lunch report directly from GoHunter, which would send the report directly to the Slack channel we usually use to submit reports.
As usual, we end MTS with a beer bash online on Zoom 🥳
