Newsletter

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

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THE FIFTH ELEPHANT

AI Startups get a policy shock with MeitY advisory

An AI advisory issued by MeitY shook every GenAI start-up founder in the last month. A mix of vague clauses and terms constituting the text raises more questions than it answers. Inconsistent communication from MeitY to clarify the legalese did not help matters either.

These AI regulations highlight the need to have an open dialogue between developers, startups and policy makers. Anwesha Sen, project manager at Anthill Inside, draws on community insights to explain the problems with the recent AI advisory.

Read here or join the conversation in the AI and Policy group.

ROOTCONF

When it comes to crypto, don’t be a hero

“Avoid being a maverick when dealing with highly sensitive, personally Identifiable Information (PII)”. Abhay Rana (captn3m0) explains why you probably shouldn’t roll out your own crypto (unless it’s peer reviewed).

Abhay recommends sticking to mature and well-tested technologies like TLS, bcrypt and HMAC which are built by cryptography experts, peer-reviewed and only then established as industry standard. He also shares security horror stories and valuable lessons learnt while building Razorpay.

Watch now ▶️

THE FIFTH ELEPHANT

The Fifth Elephant Open Source AI Hackathon - demo day highlights

Read and comment on the hackathon projects

ROOTCONF

Scaling up: How Freshdesk went from 7K rpm to 700k rpm by choosing shell architecture

Raadhika Srinivasan (Senior Software Engineer at Freshworks) explains how choosing shell architecture helped Freshdesk scale from serving a few thousand requests per minute to a whopping 7,00,000 requests per minute.

Re-architecting at the right time eliminated a whole class of recurring availability issues and positioned Freshdesk for substantial growth. Is shell architecture right for your organization? Raadhikaa lays down the pros and cons to help you decide.

Watch now ▶️

HAPPENINGS AT HASGEEK

1. Ever wondered why India’s top companies have such varied engineering functions? And what it means to be a platform engineer versus a Cloud Platform Engineer (CPE) versus DevOps?
   Confused?!?!?!?
   Don’t worry. Rootconf is here to help.
   On Thursday, 25 April, a monthly series of talks and BOFs where engineering leaders from India’s top companies share the evolution of engineering org, culture and careers. The fine folks at Myntra - Ashutosh Sharma, Vivekanand and Vardaraj - are first in line to share their story - RSVP to Attend

2. Is your organization planning to migrate to k8s? What are the starting problems that you will likely face? Neeraj Bisht (Flipkart) and Arya Ketan (Sharechat) will answer your queries on 27 April in an online AMA - Read more

3. LLMs in healthcare are here to assist diagnostics, not to replace human beings. Intrigued? Harini Anand, a clinical AI developer, will discuss Med-PaLM M, a large multimodal generative model that interprets biomedical data. Harini is part of the multidisciplinary team which developed Med-PaLM M. Don’t miss this fascinating discussion by a young researcher, on 3rd May - Read more
   Icymi, Harini has explained what the paper is about, and why you should attend - Read more

FRESH: VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS

GOLEM CO

Raising funds for early stage Robotics startups

Fundraising for a deep tech start-up, which might not have any significant MRR in the nascent stages, is crucial. Pranav, co-founder at Accio, delves into getting the right investors who understand your niche and will help your startup gain sufficient leverage. Having a focused business strategy and having the right answers while pitching is key — a major factor for the robotics startup in raising a cumulative ₹18.6 Cr pre-seed.

Watch now ▶️

ROOTCONF

Software Delivery: Prioritizing and optimizing for impact

An engineering-led approach for prioritizing what to build is to say “show me the data”; what is the potential impact of building out a certain feature?
The answer to this question starts an iterative, data-driven process, which gives directional clues for course correction, while also giving a better definition of the outcome for both leaders and engineers. Gaurav Lochan, Head of Engineering at PhonePe, shares his pragmatic approach on prioritization to deliver highly impactful software.

Watch now ▶️

MEMBERS IN ACTION

Divya Dixit, Sr. Analyst, currently enables her team in delivering impactful ML models at a leading Healthcare RCM provider. Having successfully transitioned from a VOIP networks background to ML development after a career break, she recognizes the pivotal role of communities.

Be it sharing insights or mentoring folks, she actively contributes to these forums. Divya encourages others to seek help and engage within communities proactively. Her mantra: 'Network more and travel often’ :)

UPCOMING EVENTS / AROUND THE CORNER

Engineering culture and evolution in Myntra | [Talk + BOF] | 25 April, 5:30 PM | Read more

Ready to switch to k8s - resolve your start problems | Online AMA | 27 April, 11 AM | Read more

LLMs in Healthcare: diagnostic assistance, not replacement | Paper discussion | 3 May, 5:30 PM | Read more