Overview

Hackpost Guide brings hackathon guides and event listings together for high school and university students. I built it to make it easier for beginners to find useful resources, learn how to build a project, and choose an event to attend.

Key Features

• Guide Platform: Built a blogging engine where students and organizers can post detailed tutorials on APIs, UI/UX, pitching, and more.
• Community & Partnerships: Partnered with HackPrinceton, YHack, and other major university hackathons to promote inclusivity and accessibility.
• Hackpost Guide Hackathon: Organized a global online hackathon with hundreds of participants, featuring mentorship, workshops, and sponsorships — with its own dedicated event site.
• User Metrics: Over 2,500 users from 80+ countries.
• Open Contribution Model: The repository is structured for first-time contributors — pick an issue, comment, submit a PR. For many students it doubles as their first open-source contribution.

Technologies Used

• Next.js 16 + React 19: Fast, scalable frontend and serverless backend routes, maintained across major framework upgrades.
• Tailwind CSS: For designing a responsive, accessible, and modern UI.
• Firebase: Authentication and data storage with Firestore.

Challenges and lessons

Creating a platform that balances editorial control with community contributions required careful thought around database schema design, user onboarding, and moderation tools. Handling performance issues like API timeouts and optimizing for global delivery also taught me the importance of lightweight client/server interactions and caching strategies.

Outcome

Hackpost Guide grew from a personal project to a platform used by over 2,500 students across 80+ countries. Partnerships with hackathon organizers, newsletters, and community contributions helped it reach that audience. Open source on GitHub: main site · hackathon site.