After the first IdeaPo milestone, I pushed the platform into a more complete live-hackathon workflow. This update focused on the global registration flow, the live event lobby, team communication, and the security layer that helps organizers monitor participants during a challenge.

The main goal was to validate the core experience before polishing the frontend: organizers can create a live hackathon, configure tasks and test cases, move participants into the event, and keep teams connected during the session.

What the demo covers:

• Organizer flow for creating and starting a live hackathon
• Participant rejoin flow through an invitation code
• Global chat for the full event
• Private team chat and document sharing
• Voice communication for team collaboration
• Camera permission checks before entering a live event

A big part of this update is the violation-tracking pipeline. The system can detect suspicious actions such as camera-feed tampering, browser feature misuse, copy/paste or content injection attempts, and unauthorized terminal usage. These events are pushed into a Kafka violation topic with the related user ID, making the monitoring flow real-time and traceable.

I also tested the penalty workflow: when a participant is removed for a violation, the participant receives an immediate alert, the team is notified by email, and the tournament score can be adjusted automatically. This turns violation handling from a manual organizer task into an integrated platform behavior.

Tech stack highlighted in this update:
Frontend: Angular
Backend: Spring Boot and FastAPI in a hybrid microservices architecture
Streaming and messaging: Apache Kafka for notifications, live pipelines, and event processing

This version was still very much a work in progress, especially visually, but it proved that the difficult parts of the workflow could run together: live registration, collaboration, monitoring, real-time events, and automated notifications.

Original LinkedIn update: IdeaPo Hackathon Platform: Live Demo Update