🎃 How We Built a SaaS Platform in 3 Weeks' The story of Distrogent, our Kiroween Hackathon entry. Featuring Go, Kubernetes.
Source: Dev.to
The “Great” Idea 💡
You know that moment in a hackathon where you decide to build something way too complicated? For the Kiroween Hackathon, my team looked at each other and said:
“Let’s not build a game. Let’s build a Multi‑Tenant SaaS Orchestration Platform.”
Silence.
“And let’s make it Halloween themed.”
Thus, Distrogent was born – a tool that automates all the boring, scary infrastructure stuff (like provisioning databases and namespaces) so you don’t have to. If you’ve ever tried to build a B2B app, you know the pain: Customer A wants their own database.
We decided to use a “serious” tech stack:
- Go for the backend
- Python for analysis
- Kubernetes Operators to manage the chaos
Writing Kubernetes Operators from scratch is… let’s just say a special kind of torture. You have to deal with CRDs, reconciliation loops, and a million lines of boilerplate YAML.
Look, I’m not saying we cheated, but using Kiro felt like having a senior engineer sitting next to us. When we were drowning in Go structs and Kubernetes API definitions, Kiro helped generate the boilerplate and make sense of the errors. It let us focus on the logic (and the spooky ghost animations) instead of fighting with syntax.
We built the core tenant‑manager service in record time because we weren’t getting stuck on the small stuff. It was honestly a vibe.
Since this is Kiroween, we couldn’t just ship a boring gray dashboard. We built a Dynamic Theme Engine that toggles the entire UI into “Witching Hour” mode—colors like deep bruised purples and pumpkin oranges.
It was chaotic, it was stressful, but it was also the most fun we’ve had coding in a long time. If you’re building something complex, do yourself a favor:
- Get a good team
- Get plenty of coffee
- Definitely give Kiro a spin
It might just save your hackathon.
Happy Kiroween! 🎃🕸️