Univent

College fests run on WhatsApp groups and notice boards. Announcements get lost, participants don't know what's happening where, and nobody knows the scores until the end.

A real-time platform for college events. Organisers create events and push announcements that reach everyone instantly; participants register in one click and watch leaderboards update live. Admins, organisers and participants each get their own dashboard and permissions.

• Real-time with Socket.IO, so announcements and scores appear without refreshing.
• Role-based access for three roles (admin, organiser, participant), each with its own permissions, backed by JWT authentication and Google sign-in.
• Split into microservices (auth, events, notifications, leaderboards, settings) behind an API gateway.

Going live. Everything worked on my machine, but in production five separate services had to talk to each other and to the browser. Deploy day turned into a day of fixing CORS, environment URLs and routing across every service. It taught me that microservices cost a lot for a project this size. That's why its successor, Links, is a modular monolith: one deployable app with clean internal boundaries.

Univent is done. Its ideas are growing into Links, a platform for the whole campus.