Friday Hacks #303, October 23: Flip One Bit and Do You Want to Be an SRE?
Posted on by ZhengHao
Date/Time: Friday, October 23 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm SGT
Venue: Seminar Room 12, COM3-01-21, NUS
Sign-up: Luma
Food 🍕 will be served!
1) Flip One Bit: Unlocking, Counting and Repairing Huge Grids of 0s and 1s
Binary matrices are behind QR codes, Wi-Fi error correction, and encryption. This talk follows Alice and Bob through three days of trouble to show three results from our recent paper. A smarter divide-and-conquer method inverts large binary matrices without getting stuck. An “every matrix gets one drawer” trick lists every invertible matrix exactly once. And a broken matrix can be repaired with the fewest possible bit flips. No prior linear algebra is needed: just bring curiosity about 0s and 1s.
Speaker Profile 🎙️
Ibrahim Mammadov is an MTech student in Software Engineering at NUS-ISS, National University of Singapore. He holds a BEng in Electrical and Information Engineering from the ZJU-UIUC Institute, Zhejiang University. There, he first-authored a paper in Mathematics (2026) on large binary matrices and wrote a Reed–Solomon codec thesis. He also served as a teaching assistant for Algorithms and Distributed Systems.
2) Do You Want to Be an SRE?
Join us as we explore the job scope, daily work, and responsibilities of a Site Reliability Engineer; the fun and the boring parts of being one; and what you need to learn and do to get the job and grow your career.
Speaker Profile 🎙️
Lai Xintao has been an SRE for almost 10 years. Beyond work, he is also the creator and maintainer of IRedis.
👋 See you there!