Background information

This repo wiki serves as the hub for all documentation for HackHelp.

What is HackHelp

HackHelp is a webapp, built with Svelte(Kit), Typescript, Bun, and PostgreSQL as its core technologies. It is deeply integrated with GitHub via GitHub Apps.

Features

• Organization Access
  • Granting users access based on an internal whitelist
  • Creation and management of GitHub Teams
• Repositories
  • Create and delete repositories
  • Ensure teams have access to only their repos
• Help Ticketing
  • Create tickets that are linked to GitHub Issues so that teams can share context with mentors
  • Tickets have locations mapped so teams can indicate their location
  • Tickets can be assigned to mentors and statuses keep track of what's being worked on
• Challenge Selection
  • Keep track of how many teams are allowed to be in a challenge
  • Allow teams to self-service assign themselves to challenges

Why is HackHelp

The project was started in 2025 for the 2nd Annual UVM Hackathon. In the previous year, teams were free to track their code wherever they wanted, as long as event organizers were able to access it in some way. For 2025 and onward, we decided to standardize code hosting on GitHub for a few reasons:

• Git is an industry standard, and GitHub is very commonly used
• Easy to help teams resolve technical issues
• Not limited to specific users (i.e. if we used UVM's Gitlab instance)

Additionally, we decided to require all teams to have repositories under one central organization. This helps us ensure that event organizers and volunteers have access, that teams do not submit code after the deadline, among other things.

HackHelp was created to automate a majority of the work around managing that organization.