Every “we” on this site is one person.

The cracks

I loved hackathons long before I could build anything for them. The night. The deadline. A room of strangers who are a team by two in the morning. The demo you are almost too tired to give. I went to every one I could reach, and then I went looking for more.

And at every one of them — even the ones organized with real care — the same things cracked. The registration form that asked for everything and used nothing. The schedule that lived in one organizer's head. The judging sheet on paper, reconciled at 2 a.m. by someone who had not slept. The projects that were gone from the internet by Monday, as if the night had never happened. The most carefully planned hackathons I attended still had a spreadsheet at their center, and the spreadsheet always broke at the same hour: around midnight, when it mattered most.

I wanted to fix that — not for one city or one club, but so that a hackathon could work the same way anywhere in the world. A page you can open on a phone at the door. One clock that everyone hears. A judging table that adds up. And a page for every project that is still there a year later.

The textbook

So in 2019 I started building it. I did not know Django yet. I learned it lying on the floor of my girlfriend's apartment with a textbook open on my chest: a chapter, then a piece of the site. Models one evening, forms the next, then the admin, then the first registration page a real person could fill in. The site became the place where I tried every idea I had and kept the ones that survived a real event.

The textbook is long finished. The girlfriend is now my wife. And I am still here, a few meters from that floor, working on the same project — with a great deal more Django than I had then, and a much clearer idea of what a hackathon actually needs.

It only grew

It grew the way a project grows when you never quite stop. First an event and a registration form. Then teams, then a judging table, then certificates that print. Then a showcase, so every project keeps a page with faces, a date and a verdict. Then an API, a kanban board for the night itself, six interface languages and — this year — an MCP server, so you can run a whole evening from your AI assistant without opening a single settings screen.

Some years it grew by a feature a week and some years by a fix a month. It never went away. Every screen on this site exists because I needed it at a real event, and it stayed because it worked at the next one.

The site says “we” because a product should not read like a diary. But when you write to support, I read it. When something breaks at midnight during your event, I am the one who fixes it. And there is no committee behind the roadmap: it is the list of things that went wrong at hackathons I was in the room for.