The After-Party Revelation: How We Ran a 100-Person Live Lucky Draw from a Badminton Court

1. I’d Rather Play Sports Than Sit and Code

Let’s be completely honest: I am a sports person. I coach tennis, I play badminton, and I love moving. Sitting at a desk for eight hours wrestling with syntax errors is the opposite of my natural element.

Yet, I have always been deeply curious. When modern AI tools like Google AI Studio became accessible, something clicked. Suddenly, I didn't need to spend six months typing boilerplate code to bring an idea into physical reality. I could act as an architect and coach: describing what should exist, testing it in the real world, and iterating at the speed of thought.

In April 2026, during the hustle of preparing for the VBE 2026 (Vietnamese Badminton in the EU) tournament, I had already built an automated match report web app using Google AI Studio. It handled tournament brackets and court scoreboards smoothly.

With tournament logistics running at full throttle, another glaring bottleneck emerged: the gala after-party lucky draw.

Making physical raffle tickets is a logistical nightmare. You have to print sheets of numbers, find pairs of dull scissors, manually slice a hundred tiny paper slips, fold every single one, and keep them organized. We simply didn't have enough volunteers. Everyone was already exhausted from managing matches and courts.

So I opened Google AI Studio and put together a fast prototype for an online raffle.

2. The Prototype Nobody Wanted (And My Confession About Vibe Coding)

I took the prototype to my friend who was in charge of the gala after-party. She looked at it, gave me a polite, appreciative smile, and hesitated.

Every builder knows that look. When you have a hundred event details on fire, sticking to old habits - even painful ones like paper tickets - feels safer than trying something new. She thanked me, but the paper raffle remained the plan.

I didn't mind at all. In the spirit of following excitement with zero expectation of the outcome, I simply polished the prototype, left it deployed, and went right back to the courts.

Now, let me make an honest confession: that first prototype was the definition of rapid weekend vibe coding, and its security was frankly terrible.

• Attendees signed up with their display names and email addresses. The email was used as a crude recovery password.
• The host admin password was a single hardcoded string set by me.
• The admin dashboard and the stage projector screen were the exact same view. If the host clicked the wrong button, the entire auditorium saw the control panel.
• If someone inspected the network traffic, the security posture would have made any professional engineer wince.

Was it secure? Absolutely not. But it was fast, and it worked.

3. The Court-Side SOS: 100 People, Zero Training

Sunday evening arrived. The final championship matches were underway, and I was physically on the badminton courts handling refereeing, score disputes, and medal presentations.

Meanwhile, over at the gala banquet hall, reality hit. Dinner was starting in 15 minutes. Volunteers were exhausted. The paper tickets were still un-sliced, handwritten names were smudged, and panic was setting in.

My phone buzzed with an urgent text from my friend:
"Thành... that raffle app you made? Can we actually use it right now?"

I couldn’t leave the courts. I couldn't run over with an HDMI cable or give her a tutorial. I just texted her the web link and the admin password.

What happened next was pure synchronicity.

She dropped the link into the tournament’s WhatsApp and Zalo group chats. Within three minutes, all 100 attendees pulled out their phones, typed their names, and received their digital tickets.

She opened the stage screen on the venue display, tapped spin from her smartphone backstage, and the digital reels rolled across the room. Every attendee could watch the draw live right on their phone screens even while grabbing food at the buffet away from the stage.

The entire hall erupted into cheers. Not a single slip of paper was cut. Not a single ticket was lost.

The funniest part? By the time the grand prize was drawn, I had finished cleaning up the court venue and was already resting at home in bed, watching the live draw unfold in real time on my own phone.

4. Evolving into FairDraw: The Serious Engineering Overhaul

That night proved that the concept was electric. But taking a messy weekend hack and releasing it to the world required a total architectural transformation.

I discarded the prototype shortcuts and rebuilt FairDraw from scratch with enterprise-grade privacy, cryptographic security, and massive scalability:

For software engineers interested in our atomic transactions and security rules, you can read the complete FairDraw Architecture Teardown on daocongthanh.com.

5. The Host Playbook: How to Run a Flawless Live Draw in 5 Steps

Planning your own tournament, company town hall, or after-party? Here is the exact 5-step playbook: