This was the first project I've ever actually finished. Not a tutorial I followed along with, not a copy of something else — an actual thing I designed, broke, fixed, and shipped, in 72 hours, for the Hackathon Raptors Zero-Dependency Hackathon. The rule was simple to say and hard to live with: no external packages, no libraries, no shortcuts. Just the standard tools your programming language already gives you, and whatever you can build yourself on top of them. I built CampusLink — a chat ...