How We Built Our College Fest Platform with FOSS Tools

Managing registrations, team formations, and payments for a college tech fest is usually a labour-intensive process.

At the Department of Computing, CIT , we organise an inter-college fest called MELINIA each year.

Faced with commercial event management tools that were either too expensive or too restrictive,

we built our own open-source platform from the ground up , and this talk documents that journey.

We'll cover:

- Why we chose Bun and Hono for a high-performance backend, and the trade-offs involved.

- Frontend stack : building a responsive, accessible UI with React, Vite, Tailwind CSS v4, TanStack for app state management.

- Infrastructure : achieving a reproducible deployment environment using Docker Compose, Caddy, and PostgreSQL.

- Monorepo architecture with Turborepo, sharing Zod schemas across the frontend and backend for end-to-end type safety.

- Setting up a Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager monitoring stack to keep things running smoothly on event day.

The session will close with a live demonstration of the registration flow, team management features, and the admin dashboard.

Github: Melinia-CIT/melinia-26.

Platform can be accessed at melinia.in.

- This is session will be helpful for college students to build a registration portal for their college fest, without relying on any proprietary cloud services.

- The participants can gain practical insights on deploying a production-ready web application on a self-managed VPS, including networking, reverse proxies, and containerized services.

- See how a monorepo-first approach enables code reuse, consistency, and end-to-end type safety across frontend and backend.

- Understand real-world trade-offs in choosing modern FOSS tools for performance, developer experience, and maintainability, based on lessons learned while scaling to 1000+ users.