Young Lions Czechia: From manual registrations to a system the organisers run themselves

The technical solution had grown over time and carried plenty of historical changes. The biggest problem, though, was the large amount of manual work around registrations, applications and user management. The organisers had to handle:

I spent the first year mainly on technical maintenance and stabilising the whole solution:

A major part was a complete infrastructure migration to a new host, including transferring domains, DNS configurations and email services — with no downtime. The result was a stable environment ready for further development.

After stabilisation I focused on registrations and applications, which contained many manual steps. I built multi-step forms with automatic data validation, attachment handling, confirmation emails and a clear application admin. The Roger Hatchuel Student Academy programme got its own registration system, and I extended the same approach to competition submissions.

The second part was connecting the site with the Circle community platform. A registration automatically creates a community account, syncs the data, assigns access rights and places the user in the right programmes. Participants reach the community almost instantly, without an administrator's involvement.

The automation worked, but it grew piece by piece. Applications, submissions, the RHSA academy and payments became four separate plugins, each with its own queue, emails and connection to Dropbox and Circle. That had its limits:

So I moved all four into a single modular plugin that the organisers control themselves.

The whole year is configured in the admin: dates, categories, the form, Circle tags and groups, Dropbox folders, emails and the academy. A new year starts as a copy of the previous one.

The old and new systems ran side by side. The new plugin took over each part — accounts, applications, submissions, the academy, Circle sync and payments — separately, with a single switch in the admin.

I led the rewrite as architect and decision owner. The implementation was done in phases by AI agents (Claude Code) following plans I approved, and each phase was then independently reviewed by another agent. Every change had to pass more than 3,500 automated tests on two PHP versions and against a real database before it reached production.

Around key dates — opening registrations and programmes — I provided technical support for the team, monitoring and incident resolution. The rewrite also covered the handover: in-admin help with more than 30 short articles, a “How to fix” link on every error, documentation and an operations runbook. A new maintainer can take the system over.

Manual registrations and scattered systems became one system the organisers run themselves. They set up a competition year without a developer, configuration mistakes show up before launch rather than with the first team, and payments are invoiced automatically and reconciled every day. Every part is documented so a new maintainer can pick it up.