It's Monday! Time to set the tone for an awesome week!
Geek Gossip
#AIActress - A new actress is in town - Tilly Norwood. What’s the hype around her? She’s an AI actress. AI production house Particle6 and its subsidiary talent studio Xicoia have created an AI-generated “actress” Tilly Norwood. The character is not a real woman who can think, act, or make decisions independently - it is an animated avatar whose movements and speech are generated by an AI model trained on footage of actual people.
#HackingCompetition - Wiz, the cloud security company, is getting roasted for copying Trend Micro's rules for their new cloud-hacking competition, Zero Day Cloud. Apparently, they just copied and pasted from another hackathon - Pwn2Own, and now everyone's talking.
Latest Updates
Ministry Circular Goes Digital
The Ministry of Education has instructed officials to use Zoho Office Suite for all document-related tasks, promoting digital sovereignty and homegrown tech, aligning with PM Modi's Atmanirbhar Bharat vision and the Swadeshi movement.
Xbox Cloud Gaming May Go Free (with Ads)
Microsoft is preparing to announce an ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming. Sources said to be familiar with Microsoft’s strategy told that game streaming with ads is already being tested internally with employees. You’ll be able to play select games that you own as well as a selection of Xbox Retro Classics titles.
eBay Opens First Global Capability Centre In Bengaluru
American e-commerce giant eBay has officially opened its first Global Capability Centre (GCC) in India, choosing Bengaluru over Hyderabad for its rich talent pool, diversity, and innovation ecosystem. The centre will host key functions such as technology and engineering, AI/ML, applied research, product development, product management, and data analytics, and is expected to employ more than 300 engineers.
Anthropic Appoints New CTO, Rahul Patil, Amidst Infrastructure Competition And Rapid Growth
Former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil takes over as Anthropic's new CTO, following co-founder Sam McCandlish's move to chief architect, amidst intense competition from OpenAI and Meta.
Changelog
Google AI Studio - Generate Angular apps using the power of Google AI Studio.
Google Chat - Users can now send expressive stickers in conversations on the web.
Trending Projects / Code Repositories
Airweave | A tool that lets agents search any app. It connects to apps, productivity tools, databases, or document stores and transforms their contents into searchable knowledge bases, accessible through a standardized interface for agents.
AnimateIcons | A sleek React library for animated SVG icons that move with purpose. Transform static designs into engaging user experiences with smooth, performant animations.
Froggit | A modern, minimalist Git TUI. Designed for clarity, speed, and smooth integration with your terminal workflow.
In Case You Missed It
🎁 We now have a dedicated page to list all events. We will be updating this page EVERY WEEK. We will of course be publishing new (and coming-soon) events in this section but for a comprehensive list of events, check the link(s) below:
This link is EXCLUSIVELY accessible by subscribers of Heap Heap Hurray!
Hacktoberfest is now live. It is an annual event every October that encourages open-source software contributions. Participants submit pull requests on GitHub or GitLab to qualify for digital rewards or merchandise, promoting collaboration and learning in the developer community. You can participate here.
Miscellaneous
Nine HTTP Edge Cases Every API Developer Should Understand
simple examples on how mishandled HTTP edge cases can cause significant damage.
The Case For Comment-driven Development
As AI-generated code becomes more prevalent, engineers must take responsibility for writing and maintaining accurate comments to ensure clarity and maintainability. Good code is its own best documentation. As an AI-first engineer, one of the most valuable things you can do is writing and maintaining better comments. Comments are helpful for code out the door.
Distracting Software Engineers Is Way More Harmful Than Most Managers Think
There's a huge gap between how managers think about meetings and how engineers think about them. Deep Work is the kind of work that requires a big part of your brain power and usually gives some unique value.
Attention Subscribers
Every two weeks, on Friday at 7 PM IST, we distribute a “BONUS EDITION” featuring highly valuable links. These special editions are exclusively sent to our most dedicated and engaged subscribers. To ensure you receive these editions, please take the following actions:
1. Regularly open our emails. We track email open rates to identify our most active subscribers.
2. Engage with the links in our newsletter. While we provide concise summaries, your engagement is equally important.
Your active participation ensures you continue to receive these exclusive benefits. Thank you for your ongoing support and engagement.
If you are seeing the bonus edition posts in your SPAM folder, please do us a favour and mark it as NOT SPAM.
We believe in sharing great resources, and these newsletters are some good ones. They offer sharp, focused insights - especially around tech topics we might only touch on briefly.
If you're into cryptocurrency and blockchain, we recommend Cryptogram - it dives deep into the space, which we don’t often cover in detail.
For startup enthusiasts, Rustic Flute is a must-read, especially since we’ve noticed many of you love staying on top of the latest in the startup world.
