I’m Building for Shipaton 2026 | Darryl Bayliss’s Blog

I'm Building for Shipaton 2026

2026-08-07

kotlin

ios

hackathon

I’m joining a worldwide hackathon called Shipaton!

It’s been a while since I’ve been involved in a hackathon. My past experience is you grind away for a couple of hours and present what you built at the end. It’s a great experience to get something working but you don’t always get to build something that feels polished.

That’s why when I heard about Shipaton it seemed a good thing to get involved with. It’s a hackathon that starts at the beginning of August and lasts until the end of September.

The submission criteria are simple:

Publish a live app

Ensure it uses the RevenueCat SDK to provide subscriptions or Ads.

With so much time to ship and the tools these days making it easier to build something I’m dedicating a few evenings & weekends to the hackathon to join in and see how it goes. I’m hoping by the end of it I’ll have a polished product to show.

So what am I building?

The Plan

I’ll be building a Kotlin Multiplatform app that alerts developers about the status of CI builds with just a glance via widgets. After some initial market research (I searched the App Store / Google Play Store) it’s a surprisingly underserved niche.

The v1 build will support GitHub only. I’m keen to ship something quickly so adding support for Git providers beyond GitHub (the market leader) is out of scope. Adding support for other Git providers would make for a nice follow up update if I keep building after the hackathon.

The app architecture has a few layers. Its business logic layer will be written entirely in Kotlin. I’m very comfortable with Kotlin and being able to share the business logic seems a great way to write once and share across multiple platforms. The UI layer will be built using SwiftUI. I want my app to have that native feel and KMP’s ability to let you do that is a great option I want to leverage. It’s also handy that I’m relatively comfortable with Swift.

If I decide to carry on with the app after the hackathon I could build an Android client using Jetpack Compose that leverages the shared business logic layer.

GitHub provides a lot of events to consume so I’ll need a backend to handle them. To keep things manageable I’m going all in with Firebase. It’s a one stop shop for all the things I need:

Cloud Functions (Webhook support to receive and handle CI events)

Firestore (A NoSQL database to store CI events)

Firebase Cloud Messaging (Push messaging support to let users know when a build failed)

For the RevenueCat SDK integration I plan to add a subscription paywall that prompts users to subscribe if they connect more than 2 repositories. It gives just enough freedom for people to try out the app without committing themselves to a purchase. Subscription paywalls aren’t an exact science so I’ll be interested to see how this approach works in practice. It may need some tweaking to get people to subscribe.

RevenueCat also has a Kotlin Multiplatform SDK which is handy to keep my subscription logic multiplatform.

Here’s an architecture diagram of how it should all fit together:

Next Steps

The first steps will be getting a GitHub App up and running to start receiving events to my Cloud functions. Once that’s ready, I’ll look to build the app that connects to the GitHub App and receives the events.

I plan to share my progress every couple of weeks and provide insights into what went well and what was tricky. Keep your eyes peeled for the next update and wish me luck!

 Using Apple's Foundational Models in the Shortcuts App