stillwater-pulse

Stillwater Pulse is a local event discovery platform my team and I created for Oklahoma State University’s 2025 hackathon. We chose the idea because we often struggled to keep up with what was happening around Stillwater. Events and updates were spread across many different Instagram accounts, with no single concise place to find things to do.

I worked with a team of three other people and led most of the development. Two teammates had never built a web application before, while another focused on the non-programming parts of the project, so I helped guide the technical direction and organize how the application would come together.

The Next.js frontend collects recent posts from Stillwater organizations through RSS feeds, sorts them chronologically, and displays official Instagram embeds. A FastAPI backend connects that content to Google Gemini, allowing visitors to ask questions about events, restaurants, OSU updates, and other local activity. ElevenLabs gives the chatbot assistant a voice through text-to-speech playback, making the website more useful and engaging than a standard event feed.

Building Stillwater Pulse was one of the most fun projects I have worked on, and I was proud of how quickly our team learned, collaborated, and turned the idea into something that worked. Winning Best Theme and Best Use of ElevenLabs AI made the experience even more rewarding.