👀 Future of HackathonManager

[peterkos]

tl;dr: We're working on a new version 3.0, but hiatus because of our jobs, and we're deciding how to best move forward with the project given our schedules 👍

Background

Hello hackathon organizers, RIT alumni, and more!

This project has been through a lot over the past few years. While the development team graduated to fulltime work, this project fell a little by the wayside.

So, I wanted to outline the plans as they were a year ago, and where it looks for the next few years ahead.

1. New! v3.0

This project is a fullstack Ruby on Rails app, which worked great for many years, but we hit some snags along the way.

We set out to completely redesign and rebuild our codebase into a ✨ new architecture:

1. "Point and click" SaaS setup, for super easy hackathon hosting
2. Component-based design system (unified branding)
3. Vue.js frontend (so people don't need to learn Ruby)
4. Ruby or Node.js backend

This was a massive undertaking, and many issues are still open. All work is on the 3.0.0 branch. We also started rebranding to HackEngine!

2. Existing HN

Of course, this leaves the existing app as it is. It's still on Rails 5, and the latest is Rails 7 😬 -- we've done some work internally to bump up to Rails 6.

However, the existing app has out of date documentation, and may be vulnerable to security issues. We spent a few months working on 3.0 last year, and will most likely focus on that instead of maintaining the current version.

Next steps

Stay tuned!

Which is really not the best answer, I know. We understand that hackathon schedules don't make it easy to pick new platforms.

The team that originally built HM is still actively talking through how to best proceed, and we'll keep this up to date as best as we can! 🙏