# TrustForge: A Hackathon Judging System That Shows Its Work
When we started building TrustForge for DogFood 2026, I assumed the judging dashboard would be the hard part. It turned out to be the easy part. What actually took thinking was a question I hadn't planned for: how do you explain a hackathon result after it's already been published? Most judging platforms store scores and pick a winner. We wanted the process behind the winner to be inspectable…
TrustForge, a judging system for a hackathon, was built with the goal of making the process behind the winner inspectable. The team decided against a microservices architecture, opting for a single Spring Boot app with separated modules. Assignment of judges to projects is complex, requiring considerations for judge capacity, conflict avoidance, workload balance, and ensuring the same result is produced each time.
Judges use different scales, so the team introduced per-judge normalization to address this issue. The scoring formula was initially incorrect, but the team realized that combining signals on incompatible scales can lead to misleading results. They fixed this by scaling both judging and community voting inputs to the same range.
An audit table that merely lists what has been stored is not enough to ensure trust in the system's integrity. Therefore, TrustForge employed a SHA-256 chain of audit events, ensuring that each event is linked to the previous one. Finally, the team emphasized that security measures should be implemented on the backend, with access control decisions made by the backend rather than UI elements.
Acceptance testing confirmed that the system works as intended, covering various aspects such as login, dashboard, assignment coverage, normalization, audit verification, results, and role isolation.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
