160+

Live Attendees

130+

Art Pieces

$700+

Raised for Charity

0

Downtime

About the Project

A full-stack, real-time auction platform built for the Austin College Service Station to facilitate their annual charity event benefiting Tostan. Digitized the entire silent auction process, replacing paper bids with a secure, concurrent web application.

Features

  • ✓ Real-Time Bidding — Instant updates with concurrency protection against race conditions
  • ✓ Live Admin Dashboard — Real-time stats: money raised, active bidders, total bids
  • ✓ Outbid Notifications — Email alerts sent when users are outbid
  • ✓ Lazy Loading — 130+ high-res images with sub-200ms load times
  • ✓ Anti-Troll Bidding — Smart tier-based logic with rational min/max bids
  • ✓ Email Automation — Throttled SMTP queue for winner notifications

Tech Stack

Backend

Node.js, Express.js

Database

SQLite3 (Serialized for transaction safety)

Frontend

EJS Templating, Tailwind CSS

Infrastructure

Self-hosted via ngrok tunnel

Other

Nodemailer (SMTP), multer (uploads), concurrency-safe transactions