Hack the Colosseum
Hack the Colosseum is a one-day hybrid hackathon run by Glenelg High School’s Competitive Programming Club, held in person at the Howard County Library’s Miller Branch and online through Devpost. It has run twice, in 2024 and 2025, and the third edition is on October 16, 2026. I’m one of the co-directors, and I built and maintain the event site at glenelgcomputing.org, which has had more than 700 visitors.
The site
The site started as a single sign-up page for the first event. It is now a recap of every edition. Each year gets its own section with the date, venue, and format, the numbers (hackers, teams, projects, and workshops), the Best Overall team, highlights, prizes, and a photo gallery that opens into a lightbox you can step through with the arrow keys. A banner at the top points to the next edition and links to its registration on the library’s calendar. Below the recaps are the sponsors, the FAQ, and the organizing team.
How it's built
I started from an open-source React hackathon template by shadowctrl and kept its setup: React 18 with Vite, React Router, Firebase for Google sign-in, and three.js for the background. I rewrote the home page. The recap is driven by data rather than written out by hand: each edition is one object, and the page renders a section from each one. Photo paths are generated from the year and a count, so a new edition is one new entry plus a folder of numbered photos. The sponsor years shown on the page are computed from the first and last editions, so they update on their own. It deploys to Vercel on every push.
// one entry in EDITIONS, trimmed (date, summary, highlights, and prizes omitted)
{
year: 2025,
id: "recap-2025",
venue: "HCLS Miller Branch + Devpost",
stats: [
{ label: "Hackers", value: 150 },
{ label: "Teams", value: 30 },
{ label: "Projects", value: 75 },
{ label: "Workshops", value: 6 },
],
winner: { award: "Best Overall", team: "Astrograph" },
photos: buildPhotos(2025, 24, captions),
}The events
Both editions were hybrid, with workshops and activities in person and a separate online track judged on Devpost.
| Edition | Date | Hackers | Teams | Projects | Workshops | Best Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | October 18, 2024 | 100 | 35 | 70 | 3 | Plutus |
| 2025 | October 2025 | 150 | 30 | 75 | 6 | Astrograph |
The events are supported by sponsors including Constellation, Stansberry Research, the Brightbots Initiative, Netesenz, and WolframAlpha, with the Howard County Library System as the venue partner.