What was wrong, or missing?
I built the backbone of Connection Engine, an open-source innovation hub that connects women developers with open-source projects, mentors and industry sponsors. It was a Code Institute hackathon project in March 2025, and I was the repo owner on a team of five. The app is Django with Stripe donations and Tailwind and DaisyUI on the front, and I deployed it on Coolify myself, so it is still live at connection-engine.stephendawson.ie.
What did you decide to do?
I wrote the two core apps: the projects app with its models, list and detail pages and forms, and the user profile app with the dashboard, the mentor model and the maintainer checks. The milestone, mentor and goal feature was mine as well, models through to templates. I did the Stripe donations end to end: the webhook wiring, the sponsor button and the funded-amount display. I also merged around 40 pull requests from the other four. I have more commits than anyone on the team, 94 of the 318, though 33 are under a noreply email, so GitHub splits my record in two and undercounts me.
What did you have to fix, check or throw away?
After launch the project details page broke, and I handled the production hotfixes. I also fixed the Stripe key not always being passed. My credits here line up with the commit history: Django, Stripe, Tailwind, DaisyUI, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Git and GitHub are all in my commits. Coolify is the one the repo cannot show, because the deployment work happens outside the code.
