I led the development of Cascade Commons, which is a modern and affordable online tournament platform created by me and my coach Prabhat Aluri. Due to COVID-19, high school speech and debate tournaments could no longer be hosted in physical school campuses. The existing online debating services were cost-probhitive for many local schools and poorly-optimized for speech and debate events. We set out to create an affordable, optimized alternative.
The theme of this proejct was creating an accessible, homegrown solution for our state. Properiatary, costly software is simply not compatible with this vision. As a result, I'm trying to open-source most of the site. While I doubt we will still be supporting this platform after in-person school resumes (hopefully by the start of the 2021-2022 school year), I can imagine this platform being useful to students and schools in the future. I'm hoping that the open-sourced code will be useful to those future students and schools.
I'm also very new to this whole open-sourced code repository thing, so I'll probably unknowingly break some standards or best practices, sorry about that!