Team Builds Open-Source Hackathon Judging Platform in 72 Hours Under Pressure

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Hackathon Raptors developed RaptorGate, an open-source submission and judging platform, during the Dogfood 2026 hackathon, built on Django 5.2 and PostgreSQL 16. The team was forced to discard over 100 commits and rewrite their entire codebase from scratch after the event window shifted by 24 hours, risking disqualification under competition rules. A key technical challenge involved Django's CSRF middleware returning the same 403 error as their deadline-enforcement logic, requiring separate verification to confirm correct behavior. The team also implemented a weighted score normalization system to account for judges grading on different scales, though they acknowledged the method's limitations and advised organizers not to rely solely on rank changes for prize decisions. Several architectural trade-offs, including application-level rather than database-level constraints, were flagged by the team as areas for improvement in future iterations.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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