HackSC Engineering brings a new feature-loaded product with the potential to revolutionize the hackathon space once again.
By Anna Hsu
Los Angeles — Introducing Hibiscus: a hackathon management system designed and built by the HackSC Engineering team. From hackathon applications to event check-ins, Hibiscus is designed to make hosting a hackathon straightforward and simple.
Hibiscus can be customized to any hackathon organization, with highly reusable infrastructure that reduces the amount of setup work for other organizations.
“Hibiscus was designed to be modular so that future improvements and extensions of the platform are simply plug-and-play,” said Vincent Vu, engineering lead of HackSC. “The features and architecture of Hibiscus allow any hackathon organization — including us — to roll their own hackathon portals for all of their participants, from hackers to sponsors and volunteers.”
As a complete product, Hibiscus has a few heavily-integrated core features: Hackform, the identity (ID) portal, single sign-on (SSO), and Battlepass. These features were born after members across HackSC identified common issues when organizing previous iterations of HackSC.
“We used Typeform in HackSC 2022 to collect hacker applications, but we were disappointed in their free plan’s very low submission quota and their premium plan’s high price,” Vu said. “We still wanted the same sort of user experience Typeform provides but customized to our needs, so we built Hackform.”
Similarly, the ID portal was built to avoid chaotic check-ins at hackathon events. Most hackathons use paper wristbands to identify hackers, but they’re neither durable nor long-lasting.
“Our experience with paper wristbands was a mess in HackSC 2022, with many people losing them or ripping them off because they’re malleable by default,” Vu said. “We wanted something that could help check-in hackers without friction while being a delight to use, so we came up with these concert-like wristbands.”
When hackers enter a venue for an event, they scan their wristbands — made from silicone — on an RFID scanner, no manual look-ups required. This significantly streamlines the check-in process, reducing delays before events.
The ID portal isn’t standalone, though. Using the SSO functionality, users are able to log in to all Hibiscus products through one account, which will ensure that users can continue gaining access to new features as Hibiscus expands. This also makes it easy for the hackathon organization to manage access to different products based on a user’s role.
“Whether you’re a hacker, volunteer, or sponsor, you’ll invariably end up at our login page when accessing any of our portals for the first time,” said Joey Yap, engineering lead of HackSC. “We developed this in lieu of existing authentication solutions so that we could have granular control over user roles, which decide the Hibiscus features they can access.”
With a better way to check in hackers and an account that links it all together, Engineering partnered with Hacker Experience to bring yet another feature to the table: Battlepass.
“We gamified going to workshops and events inside the hackathon by giving hackers points for attending them, and you get prizes once you get enough points,” Vu said.
Attendance data was taken from the ID portal, linked to a hacker’s SSO account. Each event was assigned point values, and since attendance was linked to a specific event, hackers could see Battlepass rankings live on their portal.
“We believe that hackathons are more than just hacking away at your desk for 36 hours straight; learning new things about the industry, making new friends, and creating professional connections with various sponsors and speakers are as equally important as coding,” Vu said.
Despite designing and building the entire product, the engineering team only has 12 active members, split between software developers and product managers. This makes every member’s role all the more crucial.
“No matter what you’re working on, it’ll be an undoubtedly important part of the overall hackathon experience,” Yap said.
Each of these 12 members contribute to the product in different ways. However, they’re all united by one tech stack, despite coming from varying levels of experience before beginning their projects.
Hibiscus runs on Next.js, Supabase, and Vercel, which were chosen carefully due to the wide variety of capabilities they present and their smaller learning curve.
“We chose these tools because they’re simple yet allow us to build and deploy quickly without worrying too much about fiddling with other technical matters like hosting, availability, and scalability,” Vu said.
Engineering’s not just all code, though — they often work with other teams to ensure that their products achieve their intended goal.
“We split our developers into small pods where they can have more control over the technical design of their work,” Yap said. “They themselves are often in touch with members from other teams as well, such as Design and Hacker Experience.”
“Seeing the features you’ve been developing over the past few months successfully deployed at a large-scale hackathon is incredibly exciting,” Yap said. “The best reward is the wonder and joy of the participants as they interact with Hibiscus.”
