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

#devops #jenkins #docker #hackathon

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.