About HackFinder

A note on naming

The product is called HackFinder in the UI — short, punchy, and clean in a nav bar. The repo and subdomain use hackathon-finder — the full word helps with SEO (people search "hackathon finder", not "hackfinder") and makes the URL instantly clear to anyone who sees it. This is the same pattern real products use: a branded name for the interface, the descriptive name for discovery.

Deployment gotchas we hit

Building this was smooth until deployment. Here's what actually tripped us up — in case it saves you time:

• ●KV namespace conflict: The Astro Cloudflare adapter auto-provisions a "SESSION" KV namespace. If you deploy, delete, and redeploy, it fails because the namespace already exists. Fix: disable sessions with session: false in astro.config.mjs.
• ●D1 binding timing: The first Cloudflare deploy always fails because you can't add D1 bindings until after the project exists. It's a chicken-and-egg problem — deploy once (it fails), add the binding, then redeploy. This is expected.
• ●Empty database ≠ broken: After a successful deploy, the site shows "Failed to load hackathons" — this looks like a bug but it's just an empty D1 database. You need to run the migration and trigger the aggregation worker separately.
• ●database_id in wrangler.toml: The Cloudflare git integration's deploy step needs a valid database_id in wrangler.toml. A placeholder breaks the build. The ID is a read-only identifier (not a secret), so it's safe to commit.
• ●Raw HTML in API data: Devpost returns prize amounts wrapped in HTML tags (e.g., <span data-currency-value>33,900</span>). Our normalizer initially stored this raw — it displayed as broken markup on the detail page. Fix: added a stripHtml() function in the normalizer, then had to wipe D1 and re-aggregate because existing records weren't updated on merge.