Akatsuki Group Monitor

Live project: https://jpdefo.github.io/akatsuki-group/

Akatsuki Group Monitor is a personal project designed to manage the operational complexity of a SteamGifts giveaway community. The goal was to build a lightweight, data-driven dashboard that helps track member activity, cycle performance, giveaway outcomes, and event scoring in a single place.

Project overview

This project solves a real operational problem: community group management generates large volumes of data from SteamGifts, member progress, and recurring events. Instead of relying on scattered spreadsheets or manual tracking, I built an application that consolidates that information into a structured, readable system.

What was implemented

• Dashboard for recent activity, member status, and giveaway history
• Cycle tracking and monthly progress monitoring
• Summer event scoring with creator and entrant point calculations
• Manual override system to correct synced records without destroying source data
• Steam data refresh automation for library and progress insights
• Static export pipeline for GitHub Pages deployment
• Validation and quality checks for frontend and data integrity

Technical approach

• Python backend for data processing, refresh jobs, and serving local APIs
• Vanilla JavaScript frontend for a lightweight, dependency-free UI
• JSON-based persistence to store synced data, metadata, and overrides
• GitHub Pages deployment for a static public version of the dashboard
• Node-based validation with linting and tests to maintain reliability

Why this project is interesting

This project combines product thinking, data engineering, and frontend implementation in a single workflow. It required solving problems around:

• data normalization from multiple sources
• maintaining data quality in the presence of manual edits
• designing a UI that turns operational data into useful decisions
• creating automated refresh workflows without adding unnecessary complexity
• building something usable as both a local tool and a public web dashboard

Skills demonstrated

• Full-stack project design for a small but real-world application
• Backend automation with Python
• Frontend development without frameworks
• Data modeling and state management
• Deployment and static hosting workflows
• Practical problem solving in a domain-specific system

Run locally

python -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
npm install
python server.py

Open: http://127.0.0.1:4173

Notes

This project reflects my approach to building maintainable tools: simple architecture, clear data flow, and real utility over unnecessary complexity. It is a focused example of turning messy operational data into a structured system that is understandable, reliable, and easy to extend.