Friday Hacks #303: Flip One Bit: Unlocking, Counting and Repairing Huge Grids of 0s and 1s & Do you want to be an SRE?

​Friday Hacks, by NUS Hackers, is a weekly event where invited speakers share their technical experiences and interests! In this week's session, we have:

Talk 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 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. Ibrahim holds a BEng in Electrical and Information Engineering from the ZJU-UIUC Institute, Zhejiang University. There, Ibrahim first-authored a paper in Mathematics (2026) on large binary matrices and wrote a Reed–Solomon codec thesis. Ibrahim also served as a teaching assistant for Algorithms and Distributed Systems.

​Talk 2: Do you want to be an SRE?

​Join us as we explore the job scope, daily work, responsibilities of a SRE, the fun and the boring parts of being one (from an objective standpoint of course) and what you need to learn and to do to get this job, and grow your career path.

​Speaker Profile:

​Lai Xintao has been a SRE for almost 10 years. Beyond work, he is also the creator and maintainer of IRedis.

​📍 COM3 SR12
🍕🧋will be served!