October 2025
64 commits, ???? lines of code
This is probably my favourite project this year, mostly because it was highly impactful and crunched out over three solid, hectic weeks of development.
ConFest is an alternative lifestyle bush campout festival in rural Australia that has been running regularly since 1976. Attracting anywhere from 1000-7000 attendees in recent years, the volunteer crew to prepare and run this event will typically exceed 500-700, reaching ~900 in the most recent Autumn ConFest (April 30 – May 7th 2026). And these volunteers need to be fed. ConFest works to ensure a safe volunteer environment with appropriate and fair inclusion for all, which includes a volunteer kitchen called “The Hive” as a sort of unofficial hub. A regular crew of approximately 15 volunteers cooks three meals a day for the 100-200 odd volunteers on shift at any given time. For anyone with experience in commercial kitchens, this is a nontrivial effort and this raises a pertinent question: how do you handle potentially fatal allergens? Let alone the wild diversity of diets.
At Spring ConFest last October, I tackled this problem head on. The pain point for the kitchen here is simple: they peaked at 100 active volunteers on shift during the busiest days of the festival, which all need to be catered for. So what meals do you plan for, how many, what diets and what allergens?
The original pitch was simple: the kitchen lead during the festival needed a printout to tell her who needed to eat what for each day of the festival. I saw the dietary and allergens data, and straightaway knew this was a beautifully encapsulated problem that would be a fun and solvable engineering problem to address. First, I talked with the hive kitchen leads to work out what information they needed. Then I looked at the form data which was coming in. While the first gave me a rough outline, the second immediately started causing problems: there were a lot of nonstandard or unique responses. So I spent time data washing the existing responses, and tweaking the input form to correct the newly incoming responses. During the pre-event period I also consulted with other kitchen leads to add features or adjustments, and provided support and bug fixing during the festival period. One example of a feature I added was a stack of smiley faces next to each diet/allergen to visually represent the difference in people from day to day. On day one of the festival, I also printed out the daily catering sheets to stick on the side wall of the kitchen – being extra helpful!
I’m proud of the final product but came away with a few strong learnings. The main one was to plan the data model of the product before collecting data – this will save a lot of headache and catchups later in fixing the data. As part of this, for the next festival I adjusted the questions around diet and allergy to be more useful for catering planning.
Check out the live app here https://mileswhiticker.xyz/hivecatering/
Check out the source code here https://github.com/mileswhiticker/hivecateringexport
Frameworks and technical design:
- Frontend in Typescript/React
- Backend in ExpressJS with pdfkit for the downloadable PDF generator and googleapis for pulling live data from the Google Sheet with volunteer data.