Deadline Board

Inspiration

I enter a lot of hackathons and competitions for my products, and every one means the same hunt through the rules page: when does it actually close in UK time, can someone in the UK enter, is there a fee, and what exactly do I have to hand in. Deadlines get missed by a time zone.

What it does

Paste a hackathon, contest or grant link. Deadline Board reads the page (and, for Devpost, its rules page) and shows:

• When it closes, in your own time zone, with a live countdown
• Whether you can enter from your country, checked against the page's list of excluded places
• Whether it costs anything to enter
• What you have to hand in, and the video length limit
• The prize

Under every answer is the line of the page it came from, so you can trust it or check it at a glance. If something isn't on the page it says "Not found on the page" instead of guessing, and if a page gives a date with no time zone it assumes the earliest one on earth and says so.

Add competitions to a departures-style board sorted by what closes first, with countdowns, and mark each one thinking, building, submitted or skipped. The board stays in your browser.

How I built it

Planned first with the Devpost Learn skill pack (scope, PRD, spec and build checklist are in the repo's devpost folder), then built in three slices: the reading rules, a safe page fetcher, then the ticket and the board.

• Node.js 20 with no dependencies and no API keys: node server.js
• Plain reading rules instead of an AI model, so every answer can quote its exact source line and reads cost nothing
• A time zone table (PT, ET, UTC, GMT, BST, CET, IST, AoE, UTC+hh) with US daylight saving worked out by date
• The fetcher only reads public web addresses, re-checks every redirect, and gives up after 12 seconds or 4 MB
• 18 tests with Node's built-in test runner

Challenges

• Devpost refused requests that pretended to be a full browser, so the reader uses an honest user agent.
• A licence clause saying "worldwide" first read as "anyone can enter"; eligibility now prefers the actual list of excluded countries and quotes the part that names yours.
• "Close Jan 7" with no year, and "Extended deadline Oct 25, festival Oct 29 to Nov 4", both needed rules for which date the deadline word really points at.

What I learned

Planning first paid off: the PRD's "every answer shows its source" line became the thing that makes the tool trustworthy. Returning the evidence with each answer is a practice I'll reuse in anything that reads documents for people.

What's next

Calendar reminders and reading pages that only render in a browser.

Built With

• css3
• html5
• javascript
• node.js