Notion as a Backend: Building SEEK Local's Registration with Astro + GSAP
• Diego Hernández Herrera
I have been part of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) for a couple of years now. Currently, I’m the president of its student chapter at my college, and I’m deeply involved in its community and all of its events.
Every year, FOCUS hosts a national conference for college students. They invite speakers from all around the world, rent entire stadiums and universities for the occasion, and welcome thousands of students. Their 2024 conference in St. Louis, MO hosted 19k+ people1; most of them college students but also priests, religious sisters, entire families and even cardinals.
This year, FOCUS held a local version of its annual conference in my city, Monterrey. It was called SEEK Local, we brought international speakers from the US and Latin America, and it hosted 180+ students in a 3-day-long event.
As part of the staff and the designated computer scientist, I developed the website we used to promote our conference and capture registrations. The frontend was implemented with Astro + React and brough to life with the Green Sock Animation Platform (GSAP) library.
Midway through development, I made the decision to build a Notion integration to store the conference sign-ups directly in a Notion database. This served various purposes. First of all, it saved us money: we didn’t have to rent a database instance. Second of all, it saved me time. I didn’t have to develop all the interfaces needed to manage the attendees’ data: Notion already had an enterprise-grade user interface to create, read, update and delete our conference registrations. Lastly, our staff was already familiar with using Notion and our FOCUS student chapter had an educational license that let us use premium features for free. So integrating our frontend with a kind of “Notion backend” was the best option; the option that combined efficiency with familiarity and opportunity.
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