I Built HackForPinas to Make Philippine Hackathons Easier to Discover

In my previous article, I talked about Train Track, the transit app I built around Metro Manila's railway systems. This project started with a completely different problem. I kept thinking about how difficult it can be to discover hackathons and coding competitions. Not because they don't exist. They do. The problem is that they're scattered everywhere. A university might announce one. A government agency might host another. A private company might run one. A developer community might post another. And suddenly you're checking multiple websites just to figure out: What can I actually join? So I built HackForPinas. What is HackForPinas? HackForPinas is a free, public, and open-source directory for Philippine: Hackathons Coding challenges Technology competitions The idea is pretty straightforward: Make opportunities easier to discover. Events can be filtered by: Region Format Organizer type Status Organizers are categorized as: Government University Private Instead of browsing through unrelated websites, users can explore opportunities in one place. But the more I worked on it, the more I realized that the directory itself wasn't the hardest part. The data was. The Data Problem Imagine trying to collect hackathons from different websites. One might have an RSS feed. Another might use WordPress. Another might expose an API. Another might have an ordinary HTML page. And another might not have anything structured at all. So HackForPinas uses multiple scraping strategies: WordPress REST API RSS GDG Community Eventbrite HTML + Cheerio The scraper runs through a background endpoint and collects events from different Philippine technology sources. The interesting part wasn't: "Can I scrape a website?" It was: Can I turn information from completely different sources into one consistent dataset? That became a much more interesting engineering problem. I Didn't Want Anyone to Publish Directly There's another problem with a public directory. If anyone can submit an event, what s