10Billion NGO Platform

01 · Context

What the platform needed.

10Billion runs a nonprofit platform that needs to manage several distinct workflows at once: fundraising campaigns, event ticketing and donation processing, each with different data, different permissions and different reporting needs, without turning the backend into a tangle of special cases.

02 · Engineering challenge

What made the work meaningful.

Donations and event payments needed reliable tracking in real time, different users needed different levels of access across campaigns and events, and the API needed to be documented clearly enough that a growing team could build against it confidently.

03 · Contribution

What Andrew worked on.

Andrew worked as a backend developer building the REST API behind 10Billion's platform, covering campaign and event functionality, donation flows, role-based access control and payment tracking, alongside cloud image storage and API documentation.

04 · Engineering approach

How it was built.

The API was built with Django REST Framework, with role-based access control governing what campaign organizers, event managers and administrators could each see and do. Donation and ticket payments were tracked in real time against PostgreSQL, campaign and event images were stored on AWS S3 via Cloudinary, and the full API was documented with OpenAPI/Swagger via drf-spectacular so the wider team could integrate against it without guesswork. Filtering was built in with django-filter to support the platform's reporting views, and the API was served through Gunicorn in production.

05 · Key capabilities delivered

What shipped.

• REST API for campaigns, events and donations
• Real-time donation and event-ticket payment tracking
• Role-based access control across campaigns and events
• Cloud image storage via AWS S3 and Cloudinary
• OpenAPI/Swagger API documentation
• Filtering and authentication for reporting and access control

07 · Outcome

What it delivered.

• A single API supporting campaigns, events and donations instead of separate, disconnected systems.
• Real-time visibility into donation and ticket payments.
• Documented endpoints the wider engineering team could build against directly.
• Access control that kept campaign and event permissions properly separated.