HackBook

Inspiration

After attending half a dozen hackathons, we noticed processes, tools, and flaws that could be drastically improved. We recognised the following:

Attendance in workshops, tech talks, and other events that take place had a low attendance rate regardless of having a chance to win'swag'.
Meal tickets are easily misplaced or lost during the event. We realised that it can be digitized using a QR code ticketing system which allows organisers to scan and collect meal tickets.
Lack of a standardised platform for hackathons, given the repetitive structure of events (eg. MLH hackathons)

What does it do for the hacker?

It allows hackers to see their experience points on the dashboard, which they gain through individual hackathons.
Allows hackers to see a leaderboard in the hackathon they are attending.
Allows hackers to get hackathon details, including event location, timing, prizes/points.
Allows the hackers to display their unique QR code, which can be used by the organizers for event participation, meal tickets, check in, etc.
Hackers can explore the shop to see what prizes are available and what prizes they can redeem with their points. provide hackers and organizers with the ideal platform to engage live.

What it does for the organizer?

Create a new hackathon event and add events which take place within the event with details such as time, points, location, etc.
Allows the organisers to manage the hackathon attendees by allows addition and removals.
Increases attendance rate for events including tech talks, team building, etc. within the hackathon hence promoting engagement.
Add an incentive by implementing a point system which gives hackers prizes when they reach the required swag point amount. Hackers can redeem using their QR code.

How we built it

We built it using TypeScript, MongoDB, Next.js, TailwindCSS, NextUI, and deployed it with Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

-Connecting the frontend to backend. It took some time to figure out how we can best implement a backend and its corresponding frontend components to fucntion as per our goals.

Deployement. We had to prepare our program to be deployed on external hosted servers.
IP Blocking - Our IP was blocked while trying to connect to MongoDB
Our CI/CD Pipeline was hard to manage since we have multiple developers and multiple branches.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to develop an application which resonates with a common struggle faced by all members of our team.
Collaborating and leveraging our main skills,

What we learned

We learned how to manage and implement a large number of REST APIs.
We learned how to parse QR code data and process it as an input, which allowed us to fetch data accordingly.

- How to effectively manage a team development environment while deploying it (CI/CD)

What's next for HackBook?

We have built our solution to be scalable; hence, we want to be able to streamline and standardise our application to be more robust for hackathons with very large number of attendees.
Create a hackathon feedback loop where hackers can share their written experience or any comments.