Show HN: Hackamaps – A global hackathon map I build after hitting Lovable Limits

3 points

a month ago

I am based in Berlin, Germany and it is superfun to travel in Europe. I always have a guilty pressure of not connecting with other hackers or builders if I visit a specific place. I also realise planning trip around different events from platforms like Luma and Devpost is a very tedious process, I wish I have a worldwide map to see where people are building. Since I can't find one, I created Hackamaps.

I started out knowing very little on web development. It is mostly just HTML, CSS, JS. For the first interation I just use AI tool like Lovable and Windsurf. I manage to make a working prototy in a week and I my network in linkedin finds in useful. However, there is a lot of bugs and I cant fixed them. My friend Cyrus told me to code one from scratch and I took the challenge and fight my way through. Don't get me wrong Lovable is great for UI but lacks in the minor details. After a while I also realise there is a vendor lock feeling where lovable tries to trap you in their specific cloud ecosystem which made ownership and flexible development next to impossible.

Antigravity IDE: This is my new best friend. Compared to Claude Code, Antigravity feels literally like a Toyota; it gets you from A to B where Claude Code is a Mercedes Benz. Nevertheless I am super satisfied despite all the hate the got in Reddit. They struggle with bad editing at first and coding directly rather than plan at first but now they are way better.

Two months, invested I went all in and rebuild the app from scratch . My current stack is React Vite for Front End and Supabase Cloud is my whole backend. My friend Tyler came on board to overhaul the whole UI / UX for the second version and he did a phenomenal job for it.

The main engineering challenge then is the data pipeline . I am running a custom scrapper on Hetzner. You might ask, why not just do everything in Supabase and my reason is I am comfortable with Python and the have a lot of cool webscrapping library. I got the data from Devpost and Euro Hackathon. Keeping the data accurate and fromatted properly took me almost a week and it is harder than I expected.

My ultimate goal is to build a worldwide community of people who love to live in the moment and just build.

link : www.hackamaps.com GitHub : https://github.com/ostenjap/hackamaps

I would love to hear your thoughts on the project. Specifically, for those of you who aggregate data, how do you handle deduplication when scraping multiple event sources? I am also highly open to any technical critiques on the stack or general feedback on the UI.

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