VandyHacks IV Dev Recap
Introduction
The VandyHacks team hosted VandyHacks IV, from October 20–22, 2017 at the Wond’ry at Vanderbilt University, and we’re ecstatic to share that the event was a success! This Medium post aims to share how we used our technology stack to help us run the event as smoothly as possible.
Twilio
In particular, we’d like to thank one of our Twilio for their support in making VandyHacks a success. Thanks to Twilio, we were able to develop a fully functional notification system that served critical alerts to hackers via SMS. This was especially useful before the event in keeping our hackers who were traveling on buses updated about their routes.
At times, we used the Twilio REST API for manual updates, but we also built a notification system in F# to provide updates to hackers with high throughput. Our custom notification system can be found on GitHub here.
Hackathon Management
We’d like to thank HackMIT for the Quill platform, an open-source hackathon registration system that served as the foundation of our tech stack. While we did re-implement a significant portion of the codebase, we were successful in developing a unified platform for our applications, RSVPs, and check-ins, facilitating end-to-end management of our event.
We’re proud to say that our website had 100% uptime throughout the VandyHacks application process all the way through VandyHacks IV thanks to static delivery via GitHub pages, achieved by using Nuxt along with server-side rendering. Additionally, Cloudflare provided us a worldwide CDN that made our website quickly accessible from anywhere on earth. In particular, we’d like to shout out our one visitor all the way in Indonesia who likely had no issues accessing our site thanks to this!
On the backend, we store hacker data in a Mongo database hosted on mLab. Our database connected to our web application hosted on Heroku, which provided high availability.
Finally, our QR code check-in system was deployed via Netlify, which significantly streamlined the process of building and propagating the application.
Slackbot
We also built a bot for Slack, which we used as our primary communications platform for both our organizers and our hackers throughout the event. The codebase for the bot can be found on GitHub here.
Conclusion
As hackers ourselves, we embrace the spirit of building for the greater good. The VandyHacks team strives to use technology to improve our hackathon organizing process, and host better events for our hackers. Naturally, we hope to share our work with others — feel free to peruse the VandyHacks GitHub organization.
Thanks for reading, and happy hacking!
