HackTrack

Find hackathons that fit your life. HackTrack filters by your budget and class schedule, scraping MLH & Devpost so you never miss a hack you could actually attend

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Inspiration

As college students and beginner hackers, we struggled to find hackathons that were actually realistic to attend. Most platforms list events, but they don’t tell you whether you can afford the trip, make it around class schedules, or reduce costs through friends and travel choices. We built HackTrack to turn hackathon discovery into a decision-making tool, rather than just a list of links.

What it does

HackTrack finds in-person hackathons and ranks the ones you can realistically attend.

You provide:

  • Up to 3 home airports
  • Budget
  • Max travel time
  • Friday/Monday class time constraints
  • Friend cities (for possible free lodging)

HackTrack then:

  • Filters events by budget and schedule feasibility
  • Estimates flight + lodging + total cost
  • Computes a HackFit score based on prize potential, travel cost/time, and friend proximity
  • Gives a ranked list with transparent scoring

It also includes a Copy Journal action that scrapes the event site and copies a formatted markdown brief with:

  • Hackathon name
  • School
  • City/state/country
  • Date range -Origin/destination airports
  • Estimated flight/lodging/total costs
  • Markdown links for event page, Google Flights, hotel search, and more

Perfect for saving hackathon information to your favorite note-taking app like Opennote!

How we built it

HackTrack is a full-stack monorepo with:

  • Frontend: React + Vite (web + iOS support via Capacitor), guest mode + Google sign-in
  • API: Node.js + Express
  • Database: Supabase/PostgreSQL
  • Data pipeline: Python scrapers + Node loaders for events, routes, and lodging

Pipeline + backend work includes:

  • Scraping, normalizing, and deduplicating event data from multiple sources
  • Route/lodging ingestion for travel cost estimation
  • Timezone-aware schedule feasibility checks
  • City-to-airport + geocoding fallbacks
  • On-demand event-page scraping for richer journal output (school, venue, state, coordinates)

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was messy and incomplete real-world data:

  • Hackathon sites use inconsistent formats and metadata
  • Event pages often omit structured location/school fields
  • Mapping cities to practical airports is not always straightforward
  • Travel/lodging data quality varies by destination
  • Schedule feasibility required careful timezone conversion and edge-case handling

We had to build resilient fallback logic and normalization layers to keep rankings consistent even when upstream data was imperfect.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built an end-to-end system: scraping, normalization, API filtering, and ranked frontend results
  • Added practical feasibility checks (budget + travel time + class schedule), not just event discovery
  • Created transparent scoring instead of a black-box ranking
  • Implemented scrape-first Copy Journal with ready-to-use travel links
  • Delivered a user flow that turns “interesting event” into “actionable travel plan.”

What we learned

We learned how to build and maintain a data-heavy product under imperfect conditions:

  • Designing ETL for unreliable, changing web sources
  • Cleaning and standardizing messy records for production use
  • Joining multiple datasets to compute useful decision metrics
  • Implementing timezone-safe scheduling logic
  • Balancing backend feasibility checks with frontend ranking UX
  • Improving output quality with targeted scraping + fallback heuristics

Most importantly, we learned how to make incomplete real-world data still useful for real decisions.

What's next for HackTrack

  • Live flight and hotel price feeds with alerting
  • Better route alternatives (fastest vs cheapest vs best value)
  • Automatic event refresh with deadline tracking and notifications
  • User-adjustable ranking weights (cost, travel time, prize, friend bonus)
  • Resume/interest-based AI recommendations and event comparison assistant
  • ROI modeling that combines cost, prize pool, and user-defined risk preferences
  • Long-term, HackTrack could expand beyond hackathons to conferences, competitions, and other travel-based opportunities where cost and feasibility matter.

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