NexEvent

A clean, minimal event management system built for developers, meetups, and hackathons

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💡 Inspiration

As a solo builder attending hackathons and developer meetups, I kept noticing the same issue: platforms like Devpost, Devfolio, and Unstop are powerful, but the experience often feels heavy, cluttered, and not optimized for simple discovery. Finding good dev events should feel exciting, not overwhelming.

I wanted a platform that:

  • looks clean and modern
  • feels fast and intuitive
  • focuses specifically on developers and tech events
  • removes friction for both attendees and organizers

That's why I built NexEvent — a minimal, polished, developer-centric event platform created from scratch in a short time by a solo developer. This is the MVP, and the UI/UX will scale aggressively from here.

🎯 What It Does

🎟️ Attendee Experience

  • Browse hackathons, meetups, workshops
  • Filter by tags, track, & location
  • One-tap booking using verified email
  • Add directly to Google Calendar
  • Save favourite events for later (new!)
  • Manage all bookings and favourites in one place
  • AI chatbot assistant to answer questions about events instantly (new!)

🛠️ Organizer Experience

  • Create events with banners, tags, schedule, and full details
  • Edit/update/share events anytime

(Organizer booking analytics coming soon)

🧩 Core Platform Features

  • Secure authentication via NextAuth.js
  • Role-based access (Guest / Organizer)
  • Google Gemini AI-powered chatbot for event discovery
  • Server Components for fast performance
  • Cloudinary upload pipeline
  • Zod-validated forms across client + server
  • Clean UI + subtle animations

🛠️ How I Built It (Solo)

Tech Stack

  • Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19 + TypeScript
  • MongoDB + Mongoose
  • NextAuth.js v5 (JWT sessions)
  • Google Gemini AI for intelligent chatbot
  • Cloudinary CDN
  • Tailwind CSS v4, Radix UI, shadcn/ui
  • ReactBits + MotionPrimitives for animations
  • Zod for validation
  • date-fns + React Day Picker
  • Sonner for toast notifications

Architecture Highlights

  • React Server Components → minimal client JS, instant rendering
  • AI-powered chat → context-aware event recommendations
  • Connection pooling → stable serverless DB performance
  • Middleware guards → authenticated routing
  • Unique slug generation → SEO-safe + collision-proof
  • Shared Zod schemas → strong type safety across the stack
  • Modular UI architecture → scalable component system

🚧 Challenges I Faced (as a solo developer)

1. NextAuth v5 Beta Behavior

Had to dive into source code to implement role-based JWT callbacks since docs are still evolving.

2. Serverless Database Stability

Next.js API routes spawn multiple instances. I wrote a global cached connection layer to prevent MongoDB from hitting connection limits.

3. Cloudinary Upload Pipeline

Handling File → Buffer → server-side FormData inside the new App Router required multiple redesigns.

4. Slug Collision System

Events often share names. I implemented a Mongoose pre-save hook to auto-generate unique slugs like: devconf-2025, devconf-2025-1, devconf-2025-2, etc.

5. AI Integration with Gemini

Integrating Google's Gemini AI to provide context-aware responses about events required careful prompt engineering and database query optimization.

6. Full-Stack Type Safety

Keeping DB models, server actions, and UI aligned required tight Zod + TypeScript integration.

🤖 AI Assistance

Being a solo builder, I used AI assistance from Kiro to handle repetitive setup and styling work, which helped me allocate more time to design, logic, and performance.

🏆 What I Learned

Building this solo taught me:

  • Deep App Router + Server Component patterns
  • Advanced session and JWT flows in NextAuth
  • Integrating AI APIs (Google Gemini) for intelligent features
  • Serverless database connection engineering
  • Structuring a scalable Next.js monorepo-style architecture
  • TypeScript best practices using shared schemas
  • Designing UX intentionally for a developer audience
  • The huge impact of validation + error handling on reliability

This project heavily leveled up my full-stack engineering skills under real constraints.

🚀 What's Next

v1.1 ✅ (Completed)

  • ✅ AI chatbot assistant for event queries
  • ✅ Favourite events system
  • Full-text search + advanced filters
  • Multiple login options (Google, GitHub, Facebook) + handling WebHooks
  • Reminder emails
  • Event capacity + waitlist

v2.0

  • Smart event recommendations based on user history
  • Comments and reviews system
  • QR-based event check-ins
  • Multi-image event galleries
  • Ticketing + payments
  • User profiles + following
  • Public API
  • Multi-language support

v3.0

  • Mobile app for iOS + Android
  • Community polls for trending events
  • Advanced sorting: Most Attended, Fan Favourite, Cash Prize, etc.

🎛️ Long-Term Vision (Ambitious but achievable with support)

🤖 AI-Powered Attendee Dashboard

A dedicated AI dashboard that:

  • Analyzes user skills, interests, and project history
  • Predicts ideal hackathons or meetups for them
  • Scores events by difficulty, team size, prizes, relevance, personality, tech stack
  • Learns user preferences over time with a lightweight ML model

This shifts NexEvent from "event listing" → personalized dev event intelligence.

🗣️ Voice-Enabled Event Forms

  • Text-to-speech + voice-based form filling
  • Faster event creation
  • Accessibility-friendly workflow

💬 Enhanced Chat-Based Event Assistant

  • Expand current chatbot with multi-turn conversations
  • Smart suggestions while browsing
  • Instant event insights and comparisons
  • Natural language event search

🎮 Gamification Layer

  • XP for attending events
  • Badges for categories (AI, Web, Cloud, Hardware, etc.)
  • Seasonal leaderboards
  • Event streaks and consistency rewards

🎯 Goal

With proper support, NexEvent aims to grow from an MVP into a complete developer event ecosystem — combining clean UI, intelligent AI recommendations, voice assistance, and gamification to make tech event discovery genuinely fun and personalized.

Built end-to-end by a solo developer, aiming to push the UX of developer events to the next level — powered by my favorite framework, Next.js.

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