Aerophilia 2022

The problem

Aerophilia is the national level tech and culture fest at Sahyadri College of Engineering and Management, run by the student club Team Challengers. It had been on hold through COVID, so 2022 was a restart rather than another year of an ongoing thing.

Registration up to that point was manual. For a fest pulling students from colleges across India, that means someone collecting names and taking payments by hand, for every event, and no dependable record of who had actually paid once the day arrived.

The club wanted two things from a site: visibility for the fest itself, and registration that ran without a person sitting behind it.

Approach

One site carrying the landing page, every event, a gallery, login, registration and payment, with Razorpay taking the money. A completed registration doubled as the entry ticket, so the record that took the payment was the same one checked at the gate.

That only works if someone can actually check it, so the other half of the build was an admin panel for the organisers. It held everyone who had registered, which is what verification at the gate ran against, and it could register people on the spot for anyone turning up without having signed up. Around 200 did.

React on the front, Firebase behind it. Firebase meant a student team could have auth, data and storage working inside the event deadline without standing up infrastructure nobody would be around to maintain afterwards.

Normally each edition changes theme, the previous year's code is archived and the next one is built from it. The COVID gap broke that chain. There was no previous year to start from, so 2022 was built from nothing, by our batch together with the seniors, over roughly three to four months.

Worth saying plainly, since it is the honest version: before this I had built static sites and followed full stack tutorials. This was the first real one I shipped. I took most of the frontend, parts of the backend, and the design decisions.

What changed

• Around 1000 students registered online, and another 200 were signed up on the day through the admin panel
• Registrations came in from colleges across India
• The codebase was reused for the following year's edition with design changes