A Deep Dive into How We Engineered a 72-Hour Digital Renaissance

When we launched the Rebuild Challenge Hackathon 2025, we didn’t just ask participants to modernize old websites — we asked them to question the web itself. What does it mean for a digital interface to be "outdated"? How can modern tools resurrect experiences we’ve written off as obsolete? These weren’t rhetorical prompts; they were engineering targets.

And behind this provocation was a complex, purpose-built infrastructure designed to help teams deliver maximum innovation in minimum time. It was a technical experiment disguised as a hackathon — and it worked.

Laying the Groundwork: Infrastructure for the 72-Hour Sprint

To create a level playing field, we provided teams with technical resources tailored for speed and clarity. A modern tech stack was encouraged but not enforced — the goal wasn’t uniformity but transformation.

Participants received guidance for implementing Progressive Web Apps, browser extensions, accessibility overlays, and mobile-first frontends. We monitored and supported each team through Discord, building real-time support channels staffed by engineers, mentors, and community leaders. A small swarm of internal bots handled event timing, reminders, and submissions, keeping things moving without friction.

Crucially, this wasn’t a “clone this repo and edit” type of event. We designed it so that projects had to begin with critical thinking: identify a broken experience, analyze its pain points, and then apply modern tools to rethink—not just rebuild—it.

The Judging Core: Insight, Precision, and a Bit of Brutal Honesty

The heart of our evaluation process was a small but elite panel of judges, each bringing a unique technical lens to the table.

• ‍Vladislav Krushenitskii, a Senior Front-End Developer with over a decade of experience, focused deeply on interface responsiveness and performance optimization. With his background in React.js and React Native, Vladislav was particularly attentive to teams that used modular UI logic and embraced micro-frontends. “The best projects,” he observed, “are the ones where the code feels as intentional as the design.”
• ‍Anand Kumar Singh, a wireless and embedded systems architect currently at Meta, brought systems-level thinking to the table. His background spans everything from FPGA programming to high-efficiency mesh networking. For him, innovation meant going beyond pretty frontends: “If your project could still run with no cloud access, no internet, and still deliver value — now we’re talking.” His appreciation for BIOSage, the first-place winner, was immediate: “You took firmware-level tooling and made it intelligent. That’s rare and deeply needed.”
• ‍Yulia Drogunova, a Senior QA Engineer at Raiffeisen Bank, ensured each project was reviewed not just for what it could do, but how well it did it. With years of experience embedding automated tests into pipelines and handling E2E scenarios across both mobile and backend environments, Yulia highlighted quality above all. “When I see testable logic, clear flows, and thought-out UX feedback loops — that’s when I know it’s real.”

Together, this trio helped shape the leaderboard with a fine balance of technical insight, user empathy, and execution-level scrutiny.

Projects That Changed the Game

Among dozens of impressive entries, three projects earned top marks not just for functionality, but for ambition.

• ‍BIOSage took first place by reimagining the BIOS interface itself — yes, the firmware layer most users never see. It featured an interactive dashboard, real-time system monitoring, and even offline diagnostics powered by a locally hosted LLaMA model. It wasn’t just usable; it was multilingual and ran without internet access. The judges called it a “firmware feat” and “an actual innovation in system-level UX.”
• ‍Refreshify, the second-place winner, felt like a glimpse into the near future: a tool where users could paste in any URL and instantly receive an AI-redesigned modern version of that site. With real-time preview and accessibility baked in, it made the promise of automated web redesign feel tangible.
• ‍Bettershire Hathaway, coming in third, rebuilt one of the internet’s most famously retro websites — Berkshire Hathaway — into a clean, investor-friendly dashboard. With a new visual hierarchy, modular React architecture, and Buffett-isms sprinkled with care, it proved that sometimes the best innovation is clarity.

Other honorable mentions like Battle City Remastered (a faithful, Python-based recreation of the classic NES game) and ReStyle (a Chrome extension to transform Stack Overflow UX) showcased the range of creativity possible when the only constraint is time.

The Engineering Behind the Chaos

Hackathons often surface edge cases in ways no normal testing ever could. During the 72-hour period, we dealt with malformed URLs crashing auto-validators, CSS grid bugs in non-standard mobile browsers, and even a BIOS mod project that triggered hardware-level access restrictions on a reviewer’s machine.

Rather than trying to force all teams into the same mold, we built responsive tooling: UI scaffolding scripts, prompt-based testing environments for AI features, and opt-in CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for teams that wanted to go deeper.

We also introduced a “Before/After Validator” that allowed participants to submit screenshots and walkthroughs of their chosen interface transformations. This gave our judges the ability to evaluate not just the code — but the context it improved.

Looking Forward: From Rebuilds to Reinventions

The Rebuild Challenge wasn’t just an event about fixing ugly websites. It was about rethinking what modern tools make possible — even under extreme time pressure.

As we look to the future, we’re planning to evolve this model. What if instead of 72 hours, teams got just 24 — but with pre-provided backends or AI design copilots? What if every project was assigned a legacy app no one wants to touch? What if more challenges were designed around how we work, not just what we build?

Because it turns out, innovation doesn’t require blank slates. It thrives in constraints. And sometimes, the most inspiring work comes not from building new things — but from daring to rebuild what we thought was beyond repair.

We'll see you at the next resurrection.

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