MentoriaHUB

A Telegram Mini App for Kazakhstani students in grades 8 to 11 preparing for university: a catalogue of scholarships and contests, short courses with quizzes, a coin economy you can bet on your own lessons, quiz duels against other students, a leaderboard, and a shareable passport card. Built for a hackathon, where it placed 3rd out of 300 teams.

Deliberately build-free — React and Babel straight from a CDN, five JSX files loaded as script tags, no bundler and no install step. For a two-day hackathon that removes an entire category of problems: nothing to break in a build, and anyone can open the file and see the app.

The one place I didn't cut corners was the small Node server behind it. It keeps the OpenAI key server-side and validates Telegram's initData properly — rebuild the data-check string, derive the secret as an HMAC of the bot token, compare in constant time, and reject anything older than a day. That's the bit people skip in prototypes, and it's the bit that decides whether anyone can impersonate a student.