🚀 My 3-Day Hackathon Journey: Building a CI/CD Pipeline from Scratch

Avatar photoByAdil

Last week, I joined Chattingo Mini-Hackathon, and my goal was pretty ambitious:
build a complete CI/CD pipeline from scratch.

The idea was simple on paper but tough in practice — I wanted an automated workflow that could build, test, and deploy apps straight to production using Docker, Jenkins, and Nginx on a VPS.

Here’s how the three days went 👇

🛠️ Day 1: Setting the Foundation (Docker + VPS)

Day 1 was all about getting the basics in place.

  • I started by containerizing the app with Docker so it would run the same everywhere.
  • Then I spun up a VPS, set up SSH, and tightened it up with some firewall rules.
  • Finally, I installed all the necessary tools and dependencies.

By the end of the day, I had a stable environment ready for automation. It felt like laying down bricks before building the house.

⚙️ Day 2: Building the Jenkins Pipeline

This was the most exciting day for me.

  • I built a Jenkins pipeline with proper build, test, and deploy steps.
  • Whenever I pushed code, Jenkins automatically built the Docker image, ran tests, and pushed everything live to production.

📸 Here’s the pipeline I ended up with:

Seeing my commits travel from Git → Docker → Production felt really satisfying.

✅ Day 3: Testing in Production + Writing Docs

The last day was about making sure things actually worked in the real world.

  • I rolled everything out in production and tested it end-to-end.
  • A couple of small issues popped up, but I fixed them quickly.
  • I wrapped it all up with documentation so anyone could repeat the setup.

And of course, I had to make a demo video to showcase the whole thing 🎥

📚 What I Learned

In just three days, I walked away with hands-on experience in:

  • Docker → packaging apps for consistency.
  • Jenkins → building automated pipelines.
  • VPS deployments → real-world app hosting and security.
  • Documentation → because good projects should be repeatable.

By the end of the hackathon, I scored 34/40, which showed that the pipeline I built was robust and met most of the challenge requirements.

🏁 Wrapping Up

This hackathon really showed me the power of combining automation, containerization, and CI/CD.
In just a weekend, I went from idea to a fully automated deployment pipeline.

What’s next?

I’d love to take this further by adding:

  • Kubernetes orchestration
  • Monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana
  • Auto-scaling for real-world traffic

👉 Honestly, this was one of the most fun and practical projects I’ve done so far. Learning Jenkins from scratch in just one day pushed me out of my comfort zone.

Similar Posts