🚀 Inspiration When over 73,000 people joined the World's Largest Hackathon, we realized: this isn’t just a competition—it’s a logistics and compliance nightmare. Manny saw the chaos coming and pitched the idea: build something that helps judges track and verify thousands of entries.
Matthew flipped the concept: what if we didn’t just help judges—but also gave every team a way to instantly validate their own projects against all hackathon requirements, challenge tracks, and bonus prizes? That insight turned the concept from helpful to game-changing.
Mevin helped ground the idea: it needed to be ethically sound, clearly valuable, and framed as a tool for empowerment—not manipulation. That’s when we knew we had something special.
Oh—and this was Matthew’s first time coding, ever. First commit. First repo. First app.
💡 What it does The Hackathon Compliance Tracker helps teams verify that their project meets all official rules, submission criteria, bonus categories, and challenge prizes. It features a live compliance dashboard, evidence upload, a submission checklist, and a One-Shot verification tool—all built on Bolt.
🔧 How we built it We used React, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion, and Context API—built 100% in bolt.new. Data is stored in JSON and localStorage, and the UI is designed around psychological UX principles for clarity and engagement. The entire project was generated from a single AI prompt.
🧱 Challenges we ran into Translating dense hackathon rules into a usable system was tough. We also had to balance functionality with simplicity, make the UI intuitive for all users, and stay compliant with the One-Shot rules while adding advanced features.
🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of We built a self-verifying tool that’s both useful and cleanly designed. It helps both teams and judges. We stayed fully within bolt.new, met all branding requirements, and enabled a first-time developer to launch his first app.
📚 What we learned We learned how to turn complexity into clarity, how to build systems with AI prompts, and how to design for both compliance and user flow. Most importantly—we saw how a well-crafted tool can empower every user in a chaotic environment.
đź”® What's next for Bolt Hackathon Compliance Tracker We plan to open-source the project, improve judge tools, integrate storage options, and evolve it into a full platform for other hackathons and startup competitions.
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