High Stakes / Event Tech

INDEP 2025:
Zero-Budget Scale.

Digitizing a 150-year-old cultural tradition for 25+ departments. Hosted entirely on a personal laptop via Cloudflare Tunnels due to budget constraints.

Full Stack

Next.js (App Router)

Database

MongoDB

Infrastructure

Cloudflare Tunnel

Scale

25+ Depts / Live

1. The "1-Week" Pressure Cooker

St. Joseph's College has a 150-year tradition of "INDEP." Historically, everything was paper-based. One week before the event, the committee decided to go 100% paperless with zero budget for cloud servers.

The Operational Reality

Hosting on my laptop made me the single point of failure. I assumed the role of 24/7 SysAdmin.

For 6 days straight, I fielded late-night support calls from 25 department heads, debugging registration errors and clarifying UI doubts at 2 AM. It was a week of sleepless nights to guarantee 100% uptime.

System Requirements

Registration for 25+ Events
MP3 Uploads (Song Approval)
Real-time Admin Dashboard
Cost: $0.00 (Strict)

2. The "Laptop Server" Solution

With no budget for AWS, I turned my personal development laptop into the Production Server. Using Cloudflare Tunnels (cloudflared), I exposed my local localhost:3000 to the public internet via a secure domain.

Public Domain

Traffic hits indep25.com. Cloudflare handles SSL/TLS termination and DDoS protection at the edge.

The Tunnel

A secure websocket tunnel connects Cloudflare Edge directly to my laptop's daemon, bypassing router firewalls.

My Hardware

My laptop ran the Next.js API + MongoDB instance. I kept it plugged into UPS power and Ethernet 24/7 for 5 days.

3. The Tech Stack

Since I couldn't rely on external services, I chose a stack that could run completely self-contained on a single machine.

Next.js (Full Stack): Used API Routes for the backend logic. This eliminated the need to run a separate Express server, reducing RAM usage.
MongoDB (Local): Ran a local instance of MongoDB Community Edition. No network latency meant extremely fast queries.
Local File System: Uploaded MP3s and PDFs were stored in a local /uploads directory and served as static assets.

Localhost Architecture

Internet (Cloudflare)

My Laptop (Localhost:3000)

Next.js Frontend

Next.js API Routes

MongoDB

The Result

100%

Uptime for 5 Days

Zero crashes during peak registration

25+

Departments Managed

Seamless inter-dept coordination

0 Paper

First Time in 150 Years

A completely digital workflow

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