Pulse Board
Full-stack polling platform with public share links, anonymous or authenticated responses, poll expiry, analytics dashboard, result publishing, and Socket.io live updates.
Timeline
ChaiCode WebDev 2026 — Full Stack Engineering
Role
Full Stack
Team
Solo
Hackathon Rank
1st Place
Status
CompletedKey Challenges
- Poll expiry system that blocks responses after a deadline
- Anonymous vs authenticated response modes with validation
- Mandatory and optional question handling on frontend and backend
- Real-time analytics and response counts via Socket.io
- Public result publishing through the same poll link
Key Learnings
- MERN full-stack architecture with monorepo structure
- WebSocket-based live analytics synchronization
- End-to-end poll lifecycle from creation to published results
Overview
Pulse Board is a full-stack polling and feedback platform built for the ChaiCode WebDev 2026 Full Stack Engineering hackathon, where it secured 1st place.
The brief required creators to build polls with multiple single-choice questions, share them via public links, collect anonymous or authenticated responses, enforce expiry deadlines, validate mandatory vs optional questions, surface analytics dashboards, publish final results publicly, and stream live updates over WebSockets — with both frontend and backend mandatory for submission.
Key Features
- Poll creation with mandatory/optional single-choice questions
- Public share links with anonymous or authenticated response modes
- Automatic poll expiry — no responses accepted after the deadline
- Creator analytics dashboard with question-wise summaries and option counts
- Publish final results viewable by anyone through the same poll link
- Real-time response counts and analytics via Socket.io
Evaluation Feedback
Pulse Board took the Grand Final with a score of 61/80. The judges highlighted its decisive strengths: a production-grade response submission flow (two-tier anonymous dedup via an anon_session cookie + IP/UA hash fallback + an AnonResponseClaim distributed mutex with exponential backoff), deep analytics with a leaderboard and view tracking, and genuinely functional real-time integration where delta/snapshot events are consumed by every relevant page without HTTP fallback.
Score Breakdown
- Authentication & Access Control: 7/10
- Poll Creation & Question Management: 8/15
- Response Collection Flow: 9/15
- Analytics & Feedback Dashboard: 8/15
- Frontend Experience: 7/10
- Backend Architecture & API Design: 7/15
- Real-Time Updates Using WebSockets: 8/10
- Code Quality & Project Structure: 7/10
The response collection flow was rated the best in the cohort, with the anonymous dedup being the key differentiator. The auth implementation used MongoDB transaction-based token rotation (15-min access + 7-day refresh, bcrypt 12 rounds). Main gaps noted: no Helmet/CSRF middleware, no email-verification or password-reset flows, monolithic 900+ line page components, code duplication across service files, and a non-atomic recomputeAggregates pattern.