Hayden Works.

Website • GitHub Organisation

Charity Race2 is an annual hitchhike race which raises money for charity, organised by the University of St Andrews’ Charities Commission.

I hold a leading role in the team that builds the software that facilitates the race. In particular, it tracks racers so the public can see their progress and so the event safety team is able to see where everyone is.

I joined the committee to work on Race2 Madrid 2026, for which I helped build the public-facing website. Now, I am overseeing the unification and simplification of the services we build to ensure we can keep maintaining the projects for as long as they are needed.

Services

We build and maintain the following services in-house:

• A backend API with authentication (ExpressJS, migrating to Django Rest Framework).
• An internal safety console (React Admin, migrating to Django).
• A public-facing frontend (NextJS).
• A mobile app for racers to log their locations and participate in challenge activities (React Native).

Infrastructure

We use a number of open-source infrastructure projects alongside our own services. These are:

• Authentik for identity management and unified authentication.
• Duplicati for database backup management.
• GlitchTip for error logging.
• Umami for analytics.

All services, including those built in-house, are served with Coolify using the Nixpacks build system.