Hi everyone!

Do you have a project that you have spent many long hours working on, or a topic in Computer Science that you are passionate about? If so, we would like to invite you to speak at our Friday Hacks series this coming semester! Friday Hacks is a weekly meetup which includes one or two technical talks and occasionally a hacking session. Here at NUS Hackers, we are committed to spreading the hacker culture, so we welcome speakers to share their hacks, research, or technical knowledge with the NUS community. If you are interested in speaking, please indicate your interest at https://bit.ly/2YpVoW4.

Thank you!

Friday Hacks #175, August 16
Date/Time: Friday, August 16 at 6:30pm
Venue: LT16, COM 2, NUS
Free pizza is served before the talks.
RSVP on our Facebook event

Welcome back to Friday Hacks!

Welcome Tea 2019

Talk Description
We will be sharing about what we do and the importance of fostering hacker culture in NUS. We will also overview the events we have lined up for the upcoming academic year and how you can get involved in helping us spread the joy of hacking!

As usual, free pizza will be served. All freshmen and current students from all faculties, as well as anyone else who is interested, are welcome to attend.

Please RSVP if you are coming so we know how many people to cater for.

See you there!

Supported by our ecosystem partner The HANGAR by NUS Enterprise — the campus hub for entrepreneurs

Friday Hacks #176
Date/Time: Friday, August 23 at 6:30pm
Venue: The Hangar by NUS Enterprise
Free pizza is served before the talks.
RSVP on our Facebook event

Intro to purely functional data structures

Talk Description:
Data structures used in imperative languages, like arrays and hashtables, depend on “destructive” assignment to be efficient. Functional programming languages recommend a different approach to data structure design. We’ll explore some basic examples of purely functional data structures and talk about how to recover efficiency.

Speaker Profile
After acquiring a degree in Computer Science in his native Berlin, Max Wolter got his start as a freelance software developer. He moved to Hong Kong in 2013 and has been with Jane Street Capital since 2015, working as a senior software developer on all things to do with financial symbology.

Kedro - Production Ready Data Pipelines

Talk Description:
Spending long hours hunting down data sources, cleaning and building machine learning models only makes sense if your work can be deployed and achieve value for users. QuantumBlack is an advanced analytics company specialising in ingesting, engineering and modelling with huge amounts of real-world data from clients. In this talk, we would like to discuss tips and tricks, tied to real life projects of working with large data, and building production ready code from the outset. We will also share details on Kedro, QuantumBlack’s open source pipelining tool, that we use on all our engagements to structure work, and deploy quickly.

Speaker Profile
Prashant Yadav is a Senior Data Engineer at QuantumBlack. He works on building and designing data architecture and pipeline for analytics and machine learning projects. He specialises in Big Data Processing, Cloud, ETL Data Pipelines and Data Warehousing.

Paul Beaumont is a Senior Data Scientist at QuantumBlack. He works on statistical models for explanatory, predictive and prescriptive problems, and his role involves designing mathematical models to help clients understand pertinent questions about their data. Paul holds a PhD in Mathematics & Computer Science, and leads QuantumBlack’s R&D efforts in Causal Inference


See you there!

Supported by:
NUS Enterprise
The HANGAR by NUS Enterprise — the campus hub for entrepreneurs.

Friday Hacks #177: Project Intern

Date/Time: Friday, 30 August 2019, 6:30pm
Venue: LT16, NUS
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/2795189060494444
Free pizza is served before the talks.

Have you ever seen people going for tech internships all over the world? Wondering if you can get these internships as well?

Come to this session to find out why do internships and how you can get one yourself!

To the freshmen, it is never too late to start! Also learn what steps you can take to prepare yourselves for the internship process, such as the application, the resume, and the interview.

We will also be hosting a panel session, featuring a diverse set of people working in companies such as: local companies (Carousell, Grab, Sea), international big companies (Facebook, Google), some smaller companies (Stripe), trading companies (DRW, Jane Street, Jump Trading), startups, and even research!

Speaker Profile
Herbert is a year 5 Computer Science and Mathematics double degree student, as well as a NUS Hackers coreteam member.

Please RSVP if you are coming so we know how many people to cater for.

See you there!

Supported by our ecosystem partner The HANGAR by NUS Enterprise — the campus hub for entrepreneurs

Hackerschool: Introduction to Git and GitHub

Date/Time: Saturday, 31 August 2019, 1:00pm to 4:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 1, COM1, NUS School of Computing
Sign-up link: http://bit.ly/hs-2019-git

Ever used Dropbox to store your code because it makes backups? Made multiple copies of your assignment's folder just to try different things? Worked on group projects by coding in Google Docs? Git is the tool for you, it'll change the way you code for the better. We will also cover more advanced features of git such as rebasing, reverting and other life hacks.

This workshop is completely free and no programming experience is required. Anyone from any faculty or the public is welcome! Remember to bring your own laptops!

Sign up now at http://bit.ly/hs-2019-git.

Hi all, here's a quick summary of our events for the week. Remember to sign up for the ones you're interested in!

---

Friday Hacks #177: Project Intern
Date/Time: Friday, 30 August 2019, 6:30pm
Venue: LT16, NUS
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/2795189060494444
Free pizza is served before the talks.

Have you ever seen people going for tech internships all over the world? Wondering if you can get these internships as well? Come to this session to find out why do internships and how you can get one yourself!

---

Hackerschool: Introduction to Git and GitHub
Date/Time: Saturday, 31 August 2019, 1:00pm to 4:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 1, COM1, NUS School of Computing
Sign-up link: http://bit.ly/hs-2019-git

Learn how to track every change made to your files. A workshop for learning version control using Git.

---

See you there!

Hacker Tools: Linux install fest and virtual machines

Date/Time: Tuesday, 3 Sep 2019, 18:30 to 20:30
Venue: Seminar Room 1, COM1, NUS
RSVP: https://facebook.com/events/1723306277803383

Welcome to Hacker Tools! We'll be doing a Linux install fest for those who are new to Linux to try it out. Don't worry about destroying your current OS; we'll be installing in VirtualBox. We'll also show a bit of how to use Ubuntu, and some features of VirtualBox and VMs in general that may be useful when you are exploring and experimenting.

Please download Ubuntu, and download and install VirtualBox beforehand, because the files may be large and will take a while to download:
- VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
- Ubuntu: http://mirror.0x.sg/ubuntu-cd/19.04/ubuntu-19.04-desktop-amd64.iso

There is no sign-up needed. Just RSVP to let us know you are coming. See you there!

We're on Instagram now! Follow us at @nushackers.

Hackerschool: Introduction to HTML & CSS

Date/Time: Saturday, 7 September 2019, 1:00pm to 4:00pm
Venue: LT15, AS6, NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Sign-up link: http://bit.ly/hs-2019-html

Learn the fundamentals of building a website! You will learn HTML and CSS, create a simple website, and learn to deploy it on the internet.

This workshop is completely free and no programming experience is required. Anyone from any faculty or the public is welcome! Remember to bring your own laptops, and please charge fully before coming as power points are limited.

Sign up now at http://bit.ly/hs-2019-html.

Friday Hacks #178: Building NUSMods & finding evil NPM packages

Date/Time: Friday, 6 September 2019, 6:30pm
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Level 2, Town Plaza, NUS University Town
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/1142424419276558
Free pizza is served before the talks.

Talk #1: How we built NUSMods

Description
NUSModifications (NUSMods) started as a better way for students to plan their school timetables. Over time, features have been added to improve the lives of NUS students. We will share how we built NUSMods, present a high level overview of its architecture and give tips on how to contribute.

Speaker Profile
E-Liang is a coreteam member of NUSMods. He interned in Facebook in year 2 and is a foosball expert. Kai is also a coreteam member of NUSMods. He currently works at Zendesk but is not a foosball expert, yet.

Talk #2: How I discovered 19 NPM malicious packages

Description
Static analysis tools have proved to be useful to find vulnerabilities. This talk gives an introduction to static analysis and taint tracking, how to implement the algorithm and its effectiveness in finding vulnerabilities.

Speaker Profile
Tran Viet Quang is a final year Computer Engineering student specialising in Computer Security

Please RSVP if you are coming so we know how many people to cater for. See you there!

Supported by The HANGAR by NUS Enterprise — the campus hub for entrepreneurs

Hacker Tools: Shell and scripting

Date/Time: Tuesday, 10 Sep 2019, 18:30 to 20:30
Venue: Seminar Room 10, COM1, NUS
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/412610366030712/

The shell is a fast, efficient textual interface to your computer. Come learn to use the shell, and write shell scripts, to do things from managing files and processing text, to writing quick scripts that help you automate and speed up your daily computing life.

Please ensure you have access to a POSIX-compatible shell, such as Bash. If you are on macOS or a Linux distribution, you are set; if you use Windows, consider installing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) or Ubuntu in VirtualBox.
- WSL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

There is no sign-up needed. Just RSVP to let us know you are coming. See you there!

This workshop is largely based on the Hacker Tools lecture series conducted in MIT. This week's topic is based on https://hacker-tools.github.io/shell/.

The slides for Hacker Tools: Linux install fest and virtual machines are now available here: https://github.com/indocomsoft/hackertools-slides/releases/download/2019-4/course-overview-linux-vm.pdf

Hackerschool: Web Development using Ruby on Rails

Date/Time: Saturday, 14 September 2019, 1:00pm to 4:00pm
Venue: SR1, COM1, NUS School of Computing
Sign-up link: http://bit.ly/hs-2019-rails

Ever wondered how to create powerful websites that can manipulate data, such as your own personal blog and content systems? Come and learn how to do so!

Workshop is open to the public (not only NUS students). Familiarity with basic programming constructs (such as the ones thought so far in CS1010/E/S/CS1101S) and HTML/CSS is preferred.

Please bring your own laptop and charge fully before coming as power points are limited. See you there!

Thank you for coming to Hacker Tools: Shell & Scripting today!

Do fill in the feedback from here: https://is.gd/2019ht5

The slides can be found at https://is.gd/2019ht5slides

Friday Hacks #179
Date/Time: Friday, Sep 13 at 6:30pm
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Level 2, Town Plaza, University Town, NUS
Free pizza is served before the talks.
RSVP on our Facebook event

Building a high-throughput blockchain platform for applications

Talk Description
- What is blockchain and short overview on consensus algorithms
- Overview of Zilliqa
- Introduction to sharding in public blockchains
- Introduction to smart contracts and why we developer our own smart contract language, Scilla
- Short introduction to applications development - How to get started?

Speaker Profile
Jun Hao is a developer on weekdays and security geek on weekend. His experiences spanned over multiple computer science domains including blockchain, web security, trusted computing, and program analysis. At Zilliqa, he has co-developed a world-first public blockchain platform that uses sharding to scale. He is also the co-founder of 2 cybersecurity interest groups, Edgis and NUS Greyhats.

Edison leads a team of application developers at Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions provider that create trust, transparency, and convenience for the rapidly growing platform economy. Edison and his team worked on Proton, a digital advertising reconciliation platform and HG Exchange, a private equities member-based exchange. Edison holds a M.Sc from CMU, and enjoys software engineering, blockchain and cybersecurity

Open source: what, why and how

Talk Description
Open-source software is everywhere around us; from Linux to Mozilla Firefox and 7-Zip, in many cases, the preferred application for a task is open-source, and much of the Internet today runs on open-source software. We discuss briefly what exactly open-source means, why it is important for the field of computing as a whole and its close ties to hacker culture, and how you can get started both in contributing to open-source and also open-sourcing your own software. In the process, we will cover the differences between the major categories of open-source software licenses, as well as some of the philosophy behind open-source software and also free software.

Speaker Profile
Hao Wei is a computer science undergraduate, and an NUS Hackers coreteam member.

Supported by The HANGAR by NUS Enterprise — the campus hub for entrepreneurs

Hacker Tools: Command-line data wrangling

Date/Time: Tuesday, 17 Sep 2019, 19:00 to 21:00
Venue: Seminar Room 1, COM1, NUS
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/451116025745790/

Come learn how to manipulate, process, search, and make sense of any form of data with various tools, all while never leaving the Unix command line.

Please ensure you have access to a POSIX-compatible shell, such as Bash. If you are on macOS or a Linux distribution, you are set; if you use Windows, consider installing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) or Ubuntu in VirtualBox.
- WSL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

There is no sign-up needed. Just RSVP to let us know you are coming. See you there!

This workshop is largely based on the Hacker Tools lecture series conducted in MIT. This week's topic is based on https://hacker-tools.github.io/data-wrangling/.

Hi everyone,

NUS Hackers have some spare monitors that we wish to sell:
- Dell P2312Ht (S$100)
- Dell SE2417HGc (S$120)

All monitors are used, but in practically new condition.

Contact us at coreteam@nushackers.org if you wish to know more / buy one. Thank you.

Asus charger and water bottle lost and found at Hackerschool today. Please do drop us an email to collect them. Thank you! See you next week :)

Hackerschool: Introduction to Powershell

Date/Time: Saturday, 21 September 2019, 1:00pm to 4:00pm
Venue: SR3, COM1, NUS School of Computing
Sign-up link: http://bit.ly/hs-2019-powershell

PowerShell is Windows’s task automation scripting language and command-line shell. Ever bothered to write your own scripts to automate workflows in Windows? Come and learn how to do so!

Workshop is open to the public, and no prior programming experience is required. You're required to have a Windows machine, and remember to bring a fully charged laptop as power points are limited!

Speaker profile: Savindra has had 15 years of experience in the field of Windows Automation and Administration. He currently works at VISA as an automation engineer.

Friday Hacks #180: Multilingual search and Release practices

Date/Time: Friday, 20 September 2019, 6:30pm
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Level 2, Town Plaza, NUS University Town
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/425640651482799/
Free pizza is served before the talks.

Talk #1: Efficient Multilingual Search on Mobile Devices

Description
In this talk, we will explore different approaches to efficiently index, tokenize, and fetch out search results from on-device SQLite databases. We will also discuss strategies to handle non-standard languages such as Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Cyrillic, etc, and algorithms/data structures to use in-place of SQLite for advanced use cases such as pinyin search.

Speaker Profile
Vu is a NUS Computer Science alumnus, and is now working in Sea as an iOS developer.

Talk #2: Release good practices or how not to be paged at 3am

Description
Whether you write code that changes the color of a button or solves Traveling Salesman, it is only useful when released to the world. Here are some (hard earned) tips on how you can do it safer and don't burn your company/pet project/credibility to the ground.

Speaker Profile
Linh graduated from NUS SoC in 2015 and spent a few years at Facebook as a Data Engineer and then Software Engineer. As a NOC alumni (Israel and Singapore) the startup world eventually pulled him back and now he’s a software engineer at BasisAI.


Please RSVP if you are coming so we know how many people to cater for. See you there!

Supported by The HANGAR by NUS Enterprise — the campus hub for entrepreneurs