Commit Overflow 2025 | Purdue Hackers

We’ve been running Commit Overflow for a while now — since 2022! It’s our annual event where we challenge our community to make daily progress on their personal projects over winter break ❄️.

Energy off the charts

This winter’s energy was off-the-charts! We had 59 hackers, 1121 commits, and 6871 messages sent! It’s become our annual winter ritual, which always has a lively turnout. People push each other to keep going, share updates, and cheer each other on!

White page with a monospaced font that explains commit overflow and has a bar chart drawn in ascii box characters. — Commit stats from Dec 22 to Jan 12.

Discord forum showing topics from Commit Overflow. — Some posts from the commit overflow forum.

Community highlights

With nearly 60 participants, this year brought more breadth than ever before. People worked across web development, hardware projects, art, and half-baked ideas that finally got the attention they deserved.

Verilog to Minecraft Compiler

If you have ever worked with an FPGA before, you are likely familiar with Verilog. It is a language used to create circuits and processors. If you have played Minecraft, you might be familiar with Redstone. DitrusNight was able to create a Verilog to Minecraft Redstone compiler where you give it Verilog and it outputs a corresponding Minecraft Redstone circuit. They were able to make functional RAM and ROM components with this project.

A Complicated Minecraft Redstone Circuit — Example output from the compiler.

3d Action RPG

Pranav worked on his 3D Action RPG. This required a large mix of different skill sets, from development, to 3d modeling, and even music production.

A hack and slash 3d game with temporary grey enemies and grid textures on the walls — Example gameplay.

A view of Unities Shader Graph with a shader titled RadialUIShader — A Unity Shader Graph for the UI.

2D Printer

Most people are familiar with 3D printers. Imagine if we had a 3D printer but it was only 2 dimensions. Madhav made just that by taking 3D printer parts and removing the vertical axis. Instead of the traditional way that printers works, it uses a pen to draw the images.

Looks like a 3d printer but it has a pen and is drawing on paper — The 2D printer creating a drawing

Calculator Programming Language

We can’t forget the projects that teach you fundamental CS concepts. Daniel made a calculator language in Rust. Creating a programming language is not a trivial task and even just turning the code into something the computer can work with requires a lot of learning.

A tree that took a math formula and turned it into a syntax tree — An Abstract Syntax Tree of a math formula input.

Art!

So many artists participated in CommitOverflow! Here is just a selection of the different things people made and links to them.

A soft pink combination between a big cat and a sea animal — Art by Mav.

A self portrait with a person petting two cats — Art by Angela.

A photo of two earings featuring one large red stone with a chain below — Earings by Prisha.

an animation of shapes that morphs into a cat that looks around — Animation by Jadden.

A photo of a flower zoomed in with a lot of detail — Photo by Josh.

You can also check out the full Commit Overflow feed at (https://commit.purduehackers.com/feed)!

Open source, as always

As with everything we do, Commit Overflow is fully open source. We built new tooling this year to make the event more transparent and fun, and you can explore all of it yourself:

Website code: purduehackers/commit-overflow-website
Discord bot: purduehackers/wack-hacker

Conclusion

This was our largest Commit Overflow yet, and a clear signal of how much Purdue Hackers has grown! Seeing so many people choose to spend winter break building, learning, and shipping together is so incredibly motivating :) We’re excited to keep iterating on the format and see what the folks create next year!