The Complete Engineer Newsletter - Edition 4

Hydrogen powered Airbus 🚀, Gen Ai in Google Maps 🗺️ and much more...

Author

Anirudh J
February 03, 2024

Tech News

Global

Gist: Airbus’ ZEROe teams powered on the iron pod, the future hydrogen-propulsion system designed for the company’s electric concept aircraft. The iron pod contains the electric motors required to spin a propeller, the units that control and keep them cool, and the hydrogen fuel cell system.

Gist: Google Maps is integrating Gen AI features in its apps to help users navigate unknown cities. But my main gripe with Google Maps these days is its bad routing algorithm. The quality of routes has deteriorated drastically especially making a lot of mistakes with the type of vehicle and type of roads.

India

Gist: UPI will be accepted in France starting this month. Indian tourists can buy tickets to the Eiffel Tower using UPI. France is the first European nation to start accepting UPI payments. UPI is truly revolutionary!

Gist: On Jan 31st, RBI barred PayTM from accepting deposits from users to its Payments Banking. Due to this, a lot of merchants were worried that their payments would go through. This action comes after multiple warnings to PayTM. PayTM stocks also dipped more than 20% after this announcement.

Gist: Anand Mahindra recently shared a video of an autonomous river-cleaning tech and mentioned that he is ready to invest in this tech. I do wonder if this will be good or bad for the economy since this involves a lot of daily wage labourers 🤔 

Open source Github Repos

Gist: Instantly clone any voice using AI. Add styles, languages, and much more with this tool. Scary!

Gist: Instantly add powerful functions to HTML without added JS overhead. Its a very small package and fits perfectly well for bigger projects as well. Building the next generation of hypermedia on the internet.

Find the output

Answer for the last week’s question

Problem: last week at work, I committed my VM’s SSH key into my GitHub repo and pushed it. I was quick to recognize this and add this to the .gitignore file but the history of the commit still showed the SSH key. How will you remove a commit from history?

Here is what I did

  1. Make sure that the git files are not pushed to remote

  2. If it is pushed, change the passwords and regenerate new API tokens as it is already compromised.

  3. Two parts of the problem are there now

    1. Removing the file from the existing index.

    2. Removing the file from the history.

  4. To tackle 1. we can

    1. use the command git rm --cached [file]

    2. this will only remove the file from the index and will not modify the file locally.

    3. add this file to .gitignore for the future.

  5. To tackle 2. we can

    1. either use a. git filter-repo tool b. use BFG repo cleaner tool

    2. I used the BFG tool as it’s much safer and easier to use.

    3. run the command bfg --delete-files YOUR-FILE-WITH-SENSITIVE-DATA

    4. this will wipe all the sensitive files you have committed

    5. make sure to stash all your changes

    6. this will also create a new hash for your commits so after this command is executed run git push —force

Remove sensitive files and their commits from Git history

I would like to put a Git project on GitHub but it contains certain files with sensitive data (usernames and passwords, like /config/deploy.rb for capistrano). I know I can add these filenames to .

stackoverflow.com/questions/872565/remove-sensitive-files-and-their-commits-from-git-history

Removing sensitive data from a repository - GitHub Docs

If you commit sensitive data, such as a password or SSH key into a Git repository, you can remove it from the history. To entirely remove unwanted files from a repository's history you can use either the git filter-repo tool or the BFG Repo-Cleaner open source tool.

docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/removing-sensitive-data-from-a-repository

This week’s challenge

Imagine you are building a next-gen AI software product. Say, for example, AI-based voice cloning software like OpenVoice. How do you prevent someone from misusing it for the wrong purposes? I will give my thoughts next week.

Interesting Engineering blog

Indies

Gist: 1. Good engineers don’t really know how to spot good talent 2. Hiring costs like time and effort 3. Lack of technology-specific talent 4. Cost of false positives and more

Gits: The author follows an ERP (Energy-Reward-Penalty) framework to gain balance between work and personal life.

Gist: There are dozens of theories of how the brain produces conscious experience, and a new type of study is testing some of them head-to-head.

Gist: Swiggy used a combination of client-side and server-side rendering to reduce the first contentful paint from 7.2s to 5.8s. The entire stack is written in react native. Selective hydration and Streaming further improved the performance.

Big tech

Gist: This article talks about the mindset of engineers that limits their roles. It goes on deeper to explain why this mindset can harm one’s progress and how one should look at both of these as the same as they solve similar challenges.

Gist: CloudFlare had a security breach in 2023 due to Okta’s security breach. They failed to rotate the keys they stored in Okta and hence the hacker got into the self-hosted Atlassian servers. No damage was done and since they operate in a trust model internally, other systems were not reachable by the hacker.

Cool Car Wallpaper

Aston Martin Vantage

Job board - India

Big Tech

Startups

Tech Events

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