​Friday Hacks #278: Rewriting Services in Rust @ TikTok and The Hidden Power Behind APIs

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

​​1) Rewriting Services in Rust @ TikTok

​When a high-traffic payment service hit CPU limits, we took a surgical approach: rewrite only the CPU‑bound endpoints in Rust while keeping the rest in Go. This sharing walks through the decision process, correctness and performance testing (shadow mode + stress tests), rollout strategy, and the results. Practical lessons on when and how to apply Rust in polyglot systems.

​​Speakers Profile 🎙️️

​Wu Xiaoyun is a current NUS student who recently worked on high‑traffic backend services during his internship at TikTok. He writes about systems engineering, performance optimization, and tooling and enjoys sharing practical, data‑driven approaches to real production problems.

​​2) The hidden power behind APIs

​While everyone talks about AI and quantum, the quiet backbone of real-world systems is still open-source APIs. In this talk, I’ll walk through the mobile app I built at Kongsberg to control an autonomous vessel, built almost entirely on open-source APIs. We’ll dive into real source code showing Mapbox geospatial rendering, WFS/GML parsing and offline resilience with caching and retries. I’ll also share how to find and evaluate good APIs, with some industry stats on adoption. In the end I will touch briefly on GitHub’s new REST API.

​​Speakers Profile 🎙️️

​Sigurd Nordbye is a Computer Science student from the University of Oslo, spending a semester at NUS. This past summer he worked as a software engineer at Kongsberg Group, building a Mobile app that controlled an autonomous vessel. He is passionate about app building and mapping technology and is always looking for ways to bridge the gap between classroom projects and industry.