Labs on Nexus
Red and Blue team rooms for GDG PUP Study Jams
- Role
- Lead Developer
- Team
- Org
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- Shipped
01 Problem
Study Jam slides weren’t enough. Members needed somewhere safe to actually practise between sessions.
02 What I built
The whole stack on Vercel serverless: the eight rooms, the NEXUS{TOKEN_TEAMID} flag system, atomic XP and the leaderboard. There’s also a rate-limited Gemini support bot with an FAQ fallback, plus an in-memory fallback for when the database is unreachable.
03 Security notes
Flags are stored only as SHA-256 hashes and compared with timingSafeEqual. Sessions are regenerated on login, and every change passes Vitest in CI.
04 Impact
Turned the cybersecurity Study Jams from lectures into practice. Members could work through Red and Blue rooms at their own pace between sessions and see their team climb the board.
05 What I took from it
People learn security by doing it, not by watching someone else do it on a slide.