Hackathon platform built solo in 50 hours and used to run HackOn 2026. Email invites, participant portal, team formation, presentation queue kiosk with team timers, Bounty Hunting leaderboard, judging panels, and result presentation, all in one stack.
HackOn is the platform that runs the hackathon, built solo in fifty hours, shipped in time to run HackOn 2026 end-to-end. Event management for organizers, participants, mentors, and judges, on one stack.
What it does
Organizers spin up a competition, configure tracks (Showcase, Bounty Hunting, Skills & Agentic Flow, Open Logistiko, or your own), invite participants by email, manage sponsors, and define rewards.
Participants log into a dedicated portal with the agenda, track briefs, sponsors, rewards, and other participants. They form teams, join a track, register their project, and watch event progress in real time.
Mentors and judges share the same portal. Judging panels open at the right moments; project queues route feedback during the event instead of after it.
On stage, when hacking time ends, kiosk mode takes over. A presentation queue cycles through teams with per-team timers projected to the audience. Bounty Hunting gets its own live leaderboard kiosk. Final scores aggregate from judging panels and result presentation runs from the same screen.
Built in 50 hours, solo
HackOn was built by Patryk Lewczuk, Open Mercato core contributor, in fifty hours of focused build time. The whole loop covered invites, portal, teams, agenda, kiosks, leaderboard, judging, and presentation queue, all in place ahead of HackOn 2026 (Sopot, April 10-12), where it ran the event end-to-end.
Built on Open Mercato
The stack leans on Open Mercato, the AI-Engineering Foundation Framework that starts you with 80% done. Auth, multi-tenancy, audit log, email plumbing, and module APIs come from the platform, so the fifty hours went into the hackathon-specific surface: track configuration, team formation, kiosk timers, leaderboard rendering, and the judging flow.
The repo is public, fork it for your next hackathon.
Built by Patryk Lewczuk. Connect on LinkedIn.
