​Friday Hacks #287

​​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:

​1) Quack & Roll: How we created H&R 2026's hardware badges

​A hackathon souvenir that’s more than just swag - how do you make it real? In this talk, Hack&Roll 2026 organizers - Lim Yik Jin and Terence Chan - share the story behind the event’s custom hardware badges: why they built them, how they planned the experience, and what it takes to turn an idea into something that can be produced reliably at hackathon scale.

​What you’ll take away

• ​A high-level look at the end-to-end process: concept → design → prototyping → production

• ​The trade-offs that matter when you’re building for a real event

• ​Lessons learned from building hardware under tight deadlines - and what they’d do differently next time

​2) NUSMods: Building the timetable planner NUS relies on

​How does a student project grow into a tool used by tens of thousands - and stay fast, reliable, and maintainable?
In this talk, Li Kai, a member of the NUSMods core team, shares how NUSMods started as a better way to plan timetables, how it evolved over time, and what the system looks like behind the scenes at a high level.

​What you’ll take away

• ​A high-level overview of how NUSMods is built

• ​How to think about building and maintaining tools used by a large student community

• ​Key lessons from scaling a student-built product into a campus essential