Founder
2018-2020
Highlights
- From 2018-2020, I was involved in several hackathons.
- I built a Rails app to manage these events (and more!).
- It handled attendee registration, check-in, equipment rental waivers, and more.
- It was my largest project (almost 1k attendees used it!)
- Ultimately, COVID happened, but I’m still incredibly proud of it.
Background
From 2018 to 2020, I was involved in a ton of hackathons. After my first leadership experience at Hack Chicago, I found myself to be redeploying similar tooling for each event. Things like attendee registration forms, check-ins, and equipment management weren't designed around hackathon use cases.
So I built a Rails app called Dash ✨.
It handled attendee management:
And hardware rentals:
I even built a React interface for event organizers to design a custom form, which would tie into the API:
We all know what happened in 2020, and by the time hackathons had come back, I had moved on. But I'm really proud of what I created here.
In total, 878 attendees signed up through Dash across 5 hackathons. I still can’t believe that many people used a part of my first web app 🤯.
I’ve open-sourced the codebase if you want to poke around, though beware it’s years old and I can’t guarantee any best practices.