Context

Pollak Esport was built to solve a real school-level problem: organizing esports events was manual, fragmented, and hard to scale beyond a single class or institution. We turned it into a structured web platform where players and organizers could manage tournaments from one interface.

What We Built

• Tournament creation, enrollment, and bracket/session management.
• Keycloak-based authentication and role-aware access control.
• Real-time data synchronization with Supabase for active tournament state.
• Custom backend logic for event-specific workflows and rules.
• Responsive frontend focused on fast interaction during live events.

Architecture and Stack

• Frontend: Next.js with Tailwind CSS for a fast, mobile-friendly interface.
• Data layer: Supabase for realtime updates and persistence.
• Auth: Keycloak to centralize login and role management.
• Backend services: Custom API logic for tournament-specific operations.

Build Process

I built this project in iterative slices:

1. Core domain first - model tournament entities and lifecycle before UI polish.
2. Authentication integration - enforce role-aware paths early to avoid insecure defaults.
3. Realtime behavior - add live updates for the pages where users expect immediate state changes.
4. Operational hardening - improve reliability around concurrency and match updates.

Challenges and Learnings

• Realtime updates required careful query and subscription design to prevent noisy UI refreshes.
• Tournament state transitions needed strict backend validation to avoid inconsistent matches.
• Keycloak integration improved security posture and taught us practical role-mapping patterns.

Result

The platform reduced organizer overhead and made competitive sessions easier to run for students. In portfolio terms, it shows my ability to deliver a complete multi-user product with real-time behavior, secure auth, and custom domain logic.