DeadlineRadar

Inspiration

I'm a student in Vietnam (UTC+7). While reading the rules for this very hackathon, I saw "Submission Period ends October 26, 5:00 pm ET" — and realized that actually means 4:00 am on October 27 for me. International students read deadlines like this constantly (scholarships, applications, hackathons), and daylight saving makes the math even easier to get wrong. Missing a deadline by a few hours can cost an opportunity.

What it does

Paste any messy announcement — a course email, hackathon rules, an event page — and DeadlineRadar:

• Extracts every deadline and event
• Converts each one to your time zone, handling US daylight saving correctly
• Shows color-coded live countdowns: red = passed, amber = under 48h, green = upcoming
• Shows the original quoted phrase so you can verify it
• Exports a one-click .ics calendar file with reminders 24h and 1h before

How we built it

Planned with the Devpost Learn Skill Pack (scope.md, prd.md, spec.md in /devpost) and built with Claude Code. A small Node.js server exposes /api/extract. With an Anthropic API key it uses Claude (structured JSON output) to understand any date format; without a key it falls back to an offline rule-based parser with a US DST rule, so it always works. The browser handles time-zone display with Intl.DateTimeFormat, countdowns, and .ics generation.

Challenges we ran into

Time zones are tricky: "ET" means UTC-4 in October but UTC-5 in November, and many announcements state the zone only once ("all times ET"). The offline parser inherits a zone mentioned anywhere in the text.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It correctly computed this hackathon's own deadline — the exact problem that inspired it.

What we learned

Plan first: writing the scope, PRD and spec up front made the build fast and focused.

What's next for DeadlineRadar

A browser extension that highlights deadlines on any page, an email-forwarding inbox, and reminders via chat apps.

Built With

• anthropic
• claude
• css
• html
• javascript
• node.js