🔒 Unleash Your Cyber Skills at Welcome CTF with NUS Greyhats! 🔒

Hey cyber enthusiasts! Join Welcome CTF, 48 hours of non-stop and exciting cyber challenges!

📅 Aug 25-27
⏰ 10 PM - 10 PM (SGT)
📍 Online
👥 Teams of 4 (open to all NUS Students!)
🎯 Beginner friendly

Top 10 teams get attractive Greyhats merch!

🔗 Register: http://welcomectf.nusgreyhats.org/
Follow us on our social media to keep up to date with NUS Greyhats happenings events https://linktr.ee/nus.greyhats

Friday Hacks #242 🎨

🗓 Friday, 25 Aug, 7:00pm
📍 LT 18, NUS
🍕Food will be served!

If you are unable to join us in-person, you are welcome to join us online.

Sign up for food here

1. Should engineers design?

Designers design, and engineers build. This is the current state of things in the world. But is this the ideal state? Can engineers do more than just build?

Chester, a product engineer at Mobbin (a UI/UX reference library for designers), challenges norms and shares his engineering philosophy. Also, he works on Design Spells, a newsletter showcasing design details 🪄

2. 2 Side Projects: Pair Coding with ChatGPT

With the help of ChatGPT, Wei Gao assisted her designer friend in creating animations for her portfolio site and developing a web app for generating Instagram images. She'll discuss her collaborative experience with ChatGPT and insights gained.

Formerly a web front-end Software Engineer at Shopee, she now works as a Software Engineer in a financial institution.

See you there! 👋

Hackerschool: Unity for Beginners

🗓 Wednesday, 30 Aug, 7pm to 9pm
📍 Seminar Room 11 (COM3-01-20)

Sign up here.

Unity is a free and beginner friendly game engine used for game development. Join NUS Hackers and NUS GDG at our workshop to learn the basics of Unity and game development by creating a 2D platformer game. Participants from all programming backgrounds are welcomed to join!

For a smooth workshop experience, please prepare the following items:
- A laptop with adequate storage space for live development
- A Unity ID (Register at https://id.unity.com/)
- Download and install Unity Hub https://unity.com/download
- Install Unity Editor Version 2022.3.7f1 (LTS) in Unity Hub
- (Optional) Select Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022 during Editor installation (Visual Studio is the recommended IDE for Unity, you could use other IDEs of your choice but integration might vary)
- If you already have Visual Studio installed, you can configure it to support Unity development here.

See you there! 👋

Hackers Toolbox: Shell and Scripting

🗓 Tuesday, 29 Aug, 6.30pm-8.30pm
📍 Seminar Room 15 @ SoC (COM3 01-25)

Sign up here!
NUS Students
Non-NUS

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

This workshop is largely based on the Missing Semester of Your CS Education lecture series conducted in MIT. This week's topic is based on https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/shell-tools/.

See you there! 👋

The Friday Hacks session for today will be starting soon! 👾

The video shows how you could get to LT 18 from the COM 2 bus stop.

For the exact location, you can refer to the link here.

See you there! 👋

Interested in spreading hacker culture?

JOIN US! 💪

Be part of the team that is empowered to make some of the most impactful hacking-related events in NUS and Singapore happen!

Application link here!

Here are some FAQs below:

What are the kinds of candidates you are looking for?
We are looking for candidates that have an understanding of what hacking is, and are passionate about spreading hacking culture. We do not require candidates to have hacking experience/projects/skills, as long as they fulfil the condition above.

Do I need to have prior programming experience before joining?
No, we've had members whose first programming experience was in CS1010, and that's fine.

Do I need to be an SoC student to join?
No, we have coreteam members who are not from SoC! As long as you are an NUS student, you are more than welcome to apply!

Learn more about what we do and what we look out for here!

Hackers Toolbox: Git

🗓 Tuesday, 5 Sep, 6.30pm-8.30pm
📍 Seminar Room 15 @ SoC (COM3 01-25)

Sign up here!

Discover the power of efficient software development with Git, the de facto version control system used by major projects like React, TensorFlow, and Flutter. Come gain hands-on experience to streamline your workflow and become a more productive developer, solo or in a team.

Workshop Outline:
- Setting up Git
- Version Control Systems
- Basics of Git
- Branching and collaboration with Git
- Collaboration with GitHub
- Cool features of GitHub you should abuse
- Advanced Git Commands

Prerequisites:
Install Git (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git)
Create Github account

See you there 👋

Hackerschool: Introduction to Python

🗓 Thursday, 7 Sep, 7pm to 9pm
📍 Seminar Room 11 (COM3-01-20)

Sign up here!
NUS Students
Non-NUS

Join us for an exciting Python workshop! Python is renowned as one of the most popular programming languages, appreciated for its user-friendliness and vast library of modules that cater to everything from data science to web development and even game development!

No programming experience required! This beginner friendly hands-on session will take the participants through the basic syntax of Python as well as fundamental programming concepts.

We will be using Google Colaboratory for all the exercises, all you need is a Google account to sign-in and use the platform. No local install of software required!

See you there! 👋

Friday Hacks #243 💻

🗓 Friday, 8 Sept, 7:00pm
📍 i3-Auditorium (i3 Building Level 1)

🍕 Food will be served!
Sign up for food here:
NUS
Non-NUS

If you are unable to join us in-person, you are welcome to join us online.

1) Engineering for Latency, Technical Hurdles in Automated Trading
In this session, engineers from HRT will discuss the importance of latency, and share some technologies and techniques used to minimize latency in the critical path.

2) Kubernetes: Its Simpler Than You Think!
Kubernetes is a complex system, but using Kubernetes is not hard. I'll be going through the principles of Kubernetes, including networking and storage, and when to use and not to use Kubernetes. This talk assumes an understanding of computer networks.

Ambrose is a DevOps enthusiast and a software engineer and an IoT cybersecurity company.

👋 See you there!

We are closing NUS Hackers coreteam recruitment on 10 Sept. What are you waiting for? Apply here!

Hackers Toolbox: Command-Line Data Wrangling

🗓 Tuesday, 12 Sep, 6.30pm-8.30pm
📍 Seminar Room 15 @ SoC (COM3 01-25)

Sign up here!

Machine Learning, AI, ChatGPT, Data Visualisation - these latest trends are all powered by a single entity: Data. But in order to get there, we need to first learn how we can obtain data that makes sense to us.

In this week’s session, we will be learning how we can clean, organise and transform raw data into a structured and usable format, all through the Unix command line. On top of that, we will see how data wrangling is employed in Visa 🤩, offering a glimpse into its real-world application within an industry system. 

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

Hackerschool: Introduction to Machine Learning
🗓 Thursday, 14 Sep, 7pm to 9pm
📍 Seminar Room 11 (COM3-01-20)

Sign up here:
NUS Student
Non-NUS Student

If you are unable to join us in-person, you are welcome to join us online.

Unlock the world of Machine Learning with our event! Delve into ML's vast applications, grasp the difference between ML and traditional programming, and dive deep into hands-on examples like Linear Regression and K-Means Clustering. Discover the power of Scikit-learn and tackle real-world challenges. Join us to demystify ML, avoid common pitfalls, and engage in interactive learning – all in just one session!

See you there! 👋

Friday Hacks #244 👾

🗓 Friday, 15 Sept, 7:00pm
📍 i3-Auditorium (i3 Building Level 1)

🍕 Food will be served!
Sign up for food here:
NUS
Non-NUS

If you are unable to join us in-person, you are welcome to join us online.

1) From an Idea to a Product: How I Made My First Indie App
Have you thought of building your product before? Like many mobile developers, my first app was a weather app, built when I was a sophomore-student, but it’s probably pretty different from the one you use.

I will share some stories about my different roles in projects, and my continued love for making indie products.

2) From Zero to Thousands: Building a Tech Startup for DevOps and SREs and Joining Grafana
Learn the journey of building a tech startup for modern Incident Response Management, and how it eventually became part of Grafana Labs: an industry-leading observability company with millions of users. Discover the technologies chosen, challenges faced, and the stages of growth, to thousands of users.

👋 See you there!

Friday Hacks #245 ⏱

🗓 Friday, 22 Sept, 7:00pm
📍 i3-Auditorium (i3 Building Level 1)

🍕 Food will be served!
Sign up for food here:
NUS
Non-NUS

If you are unable to join us in-person, you are welcome to join us online.

Online Algorithms Made Easy
The world around us is constantly changing and at Jane Street we're receiving new data at a rate faster than ever before. When running complicated models that contain many parameters, reacting to a change in a single parameter by restarting the entire model is impractical. Jane Street makes use of ideas from research into self-adjusting computation in order to turn static models into models that can be partially recomputed in an efficient way. This talk will introduce self-adjusting computations and show how it can be used to make online algorithms easy to run and update efficiently.

Lester Tan is a software engineer at Jane Street. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science from NUS, and is currently working in the Singapore office.

👋 See you there!

Hackerschool: Data visualization with Svelte
🗓 Thursday, 21 Sep, 7pm to 8:30pm
📍DS Lab@CLB level 4
🧁 Refreshments will be served!

Sign up here:
NUS
Non-NUS

Have you been working with React, Vue or maybe Angular for front end development? Surely you must have heard of Svelte as well then, the most loved framework for reactivity and state management! Come give it a shot during this workshop, and see how much easier and pleasant writing code for dynamic interfaces can become. You will never want to hear about redux again!

This week, we are excited to collaborate with the Digital Scholarship team of NUS Libraries to learn about data visualisation with Svelte.

Please install the current version of node and npm on your machine before attending the workshop.

See you there! 👋

Last call for this week’s Hackerschool sign ups!🤩

Sign up for 🧁 here:
NUS
Non-NUS

Exciting news! 🚀 A core Svelte maintainer is joining us for the workshop! Don't miss this golden opportunity to level up your skills. See you there! 👋

For those attending the Svelte workshop today, the venue will be at CLB Level 4.

For those who would like to view the recording of Friday Hacks' session #245 (Online Algorithms Made Easy), we would need you to fill up a form with your email address.

🎥 Form Link

We will then be granting access to those email addresses by the end of next week!

Hackers Toolbox <> Optiver: Debugging and Profiling

🗓 Tues, 10 Oct, 6.30pm-8.30pm
📍 SR 15 @ SoC (COM3 01-25)
🍕 Food will be served!

Sign up here!
NUS
Non-NUS

Come learn how to debug and profile various things on Linux, all from the command line. We’ll look at how to figure out what’s going wrong with programs you write and the operating system itself. We will be exploring debugging in C++ and Python, so ensure you have a development environment for those two set up!

Greg Saunders is the Head of IT Education at Optiver and is coming down to conduct this workshop 🤩

Do ensure you have access to real Linux. If you are on a Linux distribution, you are set;
For WIndows/Mac users: Consider installing Ubuntu in a virtual machine like VirtualBox. If you are on Windows, you can also use Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. (WSL 1 is not suitable)
- WSL: Microsoft Install Link

This workshop is largely based on the Missing Semester of Your CS Education lecture series conducted in MIT.

See you there 👋