I built a progress tracker for Hack Club’s Stardance challenge — a dashboard that tells you what your hours are actually worth.
It works out your real stardust rate from your percentile and multiplier, shows how many of your tracked hours are actually payable versus how many the devlog cap is quietly eating, and tells you how far you are from the reward you’re saving for — in hours of coding, not just a number.
Right now it’s built around Stardance, but nothing about the structure is Stardance-specific. The next step is making it work for any hackathon: live listings of what’s running, which ones are still open to join, how to enter, deadlines and prizes — all in one place instead of scattered across Slack and a dozen tabs.
The hardest part wasn’t the logic — it was the presentation. A tracker only works if you actually want to open it, so most of my time went into making the dashboard something you’d choose to look at.
I’m a new coder, so I leaned on AI and a lot of YouTube to get here, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Start to finish it took me about 12 hours.
One thing worth being upfront about: there’s no database and no accounts. Everything lives in your browser’s local storage. That means no signup, nothing to log into, and none of your data ever leaves your machine. The trade-off is real — your progress doesn’t sync between devices, and clearing your browser data clears it. So there’s one-click export/import if you want to back it up or move it across.
