The Challenge
Hackathons are chaotic. Organizers relied on Slack/Teams for submissions and manual vote counting — neither scales when there are multiple categories and dozens of teams. The challenge was building something that worked flawlessly on event day, with no room for a follow-up sprint.
The Idea
Building App for Android & iOS
To develop an app for managing projects submissions in Coding Contests like Hackathons.Organizers of events use messgaging apps like slack/teams etc for project submissions , also voting on idea also happens through likes which does not scale when there are multiple categories to vote , and result assement involves manual calculation of votes.
To solve these , there is a plan to develop an Native App (Android/iOS) which can automate project submission, voting process and results assessment.
Tech Stack
React Native ecosystem : Expo CLI, React Navgigation to build UI Screens. For Backend AWS Amplify was used. AWS Amplify provides low code backend tools for Frontend developers to develop full stack web & mobile applications.[Data Store] is used to create offline first application, AWS Cognito handles authentication and AWS S3 stores the images/videos related to the project submissions.
Design document for the app is available 👉 here
Demo
Use this link to scan QR Code from the Expo / Camera App from your phone.
What I Learned
Building for events with fixed deadlines is intense. The app had to work flawlessly on day one — no room for "we'll fix it in the next sprint." AWS Amplify's DataStore made offline-first behaviour straightforward, which turned out to be critical for spotty venue WiFi.