Friday Hacks #1
Posted on by ejames
So we had our first Friday Hacks on the 26th of August, at the UTown Mac Common’s largest meeting room. We had 2 people doing their CS2103 assignment, 2 people learning Android, 1 person reading up on the iOS SDK, one person doing “random shit” (e.g.: piping his webcam input to mplayer, and output as ASCII Unicode [thanks, Vikram], on Arch), one guy learning Haskell, and one guy working on his FYP - which was building an underwater modem (using sound to transmit signals, of all things).
There were some bugs, as expected. The room’s display unit didn’t work properly, and the place turned out to be too small for all the people that eventually turned out. We’ll be looking for another place on campus where we can bring our own food and drinks.
That said, it was great fun. And there were a couple of things that went right: we had a whiteboard, so anyone could give an impromptu presentation in the middle of the session (I did one on Django, as a response to a question). Plus the round table format made it really easy to talk and share with everyone in attendance. Last, but not least - we had another whiteboard displaying ‘NUS HACKERS, FRIDAY HACKS’, which we pointed outwards from the all-glass meeting room, and waved at random passer-bys (although, I’ll admit, the majority of which were girls).
Things to work on: locate an alternative venue, one that:
- Allows food and drinks
- Has a whiteboard
- Has a projector or wall-unit of some sort
- Is still fairly accessible to students living outside
There’s no Friday Hacks next week, as we instead have the Welcome Tea. Details are as follows:
Date: 2nd September 2011 Time: 6.30pm to 8.30-ish pm. Venue: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212]. Agenda: We want to keep this to about an hour. Alumni will be speaking, the current president will explain some administrative stuff, and then we'll all break for talking, free pizza and drinks.
See you there!
