Hijab Hunt Contest System
End-to-end contestant management and voting workflow.
Backend Developer | 2024
Backend systems behind national campaigns, contests, and recommendation engines: the problem, what I built, and how it held up.
Built the contestant platform for Hijab Hunt 2024 — registration, moderation, public voting, and winner selection — all in one system the editorial team could run themselves.
A public contest is one long chain where every link has to hold. A contestant registers, an editor moderates, the public votes, a winner is announced. Break any link on the day and there is no second attempt.
I built that chain as a single workflow with validation at the point of entry, so bad data never reached the moderation queue in the first place.
The people running it were editors, not engineers, and that shaped the design more than anything else. Every step had to be something they could do without asking me.
Key impact
- Kept every submission, moderation decision, and vote in one system, so the editorial team worked from a single source rather than several.
- Rejected invalid entries at submission time instead of cleaning them up afterwards.
- Made the winner announcement something editors could run themselves, without a manual database change.
Technologies used
- PHP
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- REST API
- Security