In the jargon of the computer programmer, a hacker is someone who strives to solve problems in elegant and ingenious ways. NUS Hackers is a student-run organization committed to the spread of hacker culture & free/open-source software. We provide a support system for hackers in NUS who are currently building things (be it for charity, business or pleasure). We also hold workshops, run hackfests, and maintain open source code for the NUS community.
What We Do
We have weekly meetings every Friday called Friday Hacks. They include one or two technical talks, followed by a hacking session.
Once a year, we run a series of technical workshops called hackerschool. We also run the Hack&Roll hackathon in the second semester of the academic year. Our coreteam members contribute to events like LadyPy and Software Freedom Day.
We maintain and release open source code for the NUS community (see: our code page). Students and staff who have built NUS-specific projects and can no longer maintain them may come to us to host and maintain their code.
We run Antinews, a community site for sharing hacker knowledge in Singapore.
We currently maintain Download@NUS. We have a small team of people working with the NUS Computer Centre to host scientific data. We also have a small team of hardware hackers who meet at Friday Hacks.
Philosophy
We believe that hacking is necessary for good innovation. (In fact, the best computer-related startups and technologies have all come from hackers). As an extension to that, we think tinkering is win-win-win: you learn new things, you get to show off, and you become more attractive to employers.
(Though, honestly, most of the time we hack because we think it’s fun).
Goal
Our long term goal is to build a healthy community of passionate hackers in NUS. We think that this benefits everyone: professors benefit because they are able to source for good programmers; startups and tech companies benefit because they are able to recruit from a central pool; students benefit because they get to meet and learn from like-minded peers (and get opportunities, i.e.: from professors and tech companies). We think we are 2, 3 years away from this goal.
Management
NUS Hackers is managed by a coreteam of student-volunteers. If you’d like to request a workshop, get us to publicize your code, or ask us a question, we recommend that you send us an email through our contact form.
Current Coreteam
Michael [President] is a CS undergrad. More about him at yrmichael.com.
Eli James/Cedric is a CompSci major, and is responsible for Novelr and Pandamian. He loves ebook formats, Python, and cats. (Well, and tea. Lots of tea.) More about him at elijames.org.
Angad Singh is a Computer Engineering undergraduate. He joined linuxNUS in his first month in NUS and has been with it ever since. He codes to scratch itches, here and there. He also specializes in Embedded Systems with a varied interest in micro-controllers. He started the HackDay Series with the help of his team in NUS. He may be reached at angad.sg.
Divyanshu Arora is a CompSci undergrad at NUS. His time is mostly split among web development, linux sys administration, and random hacks. Oh, and reading interesting books. Find him at darora.com.
Shan can almost always be spotted engulfed in either his Android or his laptop. He is an advocate of open source software, and swears by Linux. If not currently engaged by a gadget that is powered up, he would either be tearing it apart to figure out how it works, or to hack it to make it faster, better and more useful! Zealous about stargazing and classical music. Just to name a couple of facets that make up Shan!
Tay Ray Chuan is a software enthusiast and student, with interests as disparate as history and philosophy. In between ploughing through his tutorials, he hacks randomly, mainly in Python and JavaScript. In addition to working on open-source, he hopes to give back to the community through his involvement in NUS Hackers.
Omer Iqbal is a Computer Engineering undergrad who loves drinking language Koolaid. These days his passions include clojure hacking, Westerosi politics and cheap coffee.
Jerome is a Computer Science major. He can be found at ayulin.net.
Alumni
We keep a list of former NUS Hackers coreteam members over at our alumni page →