Ved Joshi Hello!
Purdue Hackers is back in your inbox! You’re receiving this email because you’re someone we want to stay in touch with. This is the first edition of the Purdue Hackers Bits Newsletter, where we share what our students have been working on :)
Bit 0000: Hack Night 7.0
Our first Hack Night of the year was our biggest yet with over 120 people! With so many new faces, it was exciting to see the groups forming and the creative juices flowing. We had multiple groups of freshmen meet each other for the first time, hit it off, and start planning projects together. We even had many newcomers along with regulars present their work during checkpoints.
Here are some photos!
Bit 0001: Summer/Early Fall Ships
Here’s what our hackers have been building since last school year!
- ✦ Sketchi — an online imposter drawing game
- ✦ sieve-ai-image-detector— an AI image blocking extension that won an award
- ✦ Toggle Complex — a puzzle platforming game about flipping switches to open and close gates
- ✦ Lexeme — a command line tool that searches dictionaries across 400+ languages to help you name your projects
- ✦ Integer Overflow Endgame — an academic security research paper that received a Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security ‘26
- ✦ Harry’s Line Cam — a live camera monitor using computer vision to track wait times and food truck presence
- ✦ Purdue Hackers Webring Redesign — our webring directory redesigned with sound design and live website previews
- ✦ SHA256 Gradient Randomart — a GLSL shader generating procedural gradient artwork from the first 8 bytes of a SHA-256 hash
- ✦ Life of a Dropdown — an interactive retrospective recreating 17 historical dropdown menu interfaces from 1983 to 2026
- ✦ Oura Ring CLI — a CLI tool and background daemon for private, local-first Oura Ring data syncing over Bluetooth
- ✦ firewall — custom snooper board hardware and firmware for Purdue Flight Display E32 units
- ✦ Live Fit Gym Apple Wallet Pass — a reverse-engineered Apple Wallet pass replacing a gym’s proprietary rotating QR code app
- ✦ Rekord Ripper — a command line utility to transfer Rekordbox analysis data across songs, and find better copies of your tracks
- ✦ Spill≋ Album — a smooth jazz album produced in FL Studio that premiered at the Purdue Hackers Fall Showcase
Want to see more ships? Check out: https://ships.purduehackers.com/
For even more, visit our discord! (https://phack.rs/discord)
Bit 0010: Sound Galaxy Workshop
Earlier this semester, we hosted our Sound Galaxy Workshop where we taught people how to use p5.js to make cool interactive sound/visual experiences right in the browser! Through the workshop, many members created a lot of cool projects that they posted in our discord, see a few of them below!
Bit 0011: Our Webring
First, what’s a webring? A webring is a group of separate sites linked together, usually a hobby group or friend group’s sites. This was popular during the early days of the internet and personal homepages (like on GeoCities).
Of course, we at Purdue Hackers have our own webring (at https://ring.purduehackers.com/) and 5 people recently joined us with their new sites!
Here are just a few of the cool sites our hackers have built! Visit more through the webring!
Planning or working on a personal site? Join our webring!
Bit 0100: Partner Events
We’ve held a couple of small events with companies like Walmart, SpaceX, and OpenAI this month, bringing hackers and partner representatives together to explore career possibilities and more! (We also have an event with Neuralink coming up this week)
Pizza and Chat with Walmart
Codex Cafe
SpaceX Mixer
Upcoming events
- Neuralink Tech Talk: 10/6
- Personal Website Workshop: 10/8
- Hack Nights every Friday!
Our ask:
Help us grow Purdue Hackers!
If you know a great company, founder, alum, faculty member, or ambitious student we should meet, we would really appreciate an introduction! We’re always looking for people who want to recruit highly talented and creative students, run interesting events with us, or help fund Hack Nights, equipment, microgrants, and ambitious student projects.
Many of the best things Purdue Hackers have done started with someone in this network saying, “you two should talk.” Let’s keep it up!
And if you haven’t been to a Hack Night in a while, come visit us, Fridays at 8:00pm :)
With 💛,
Ved
