Connor About the Developer

Flowpad is developed, owned, and operated by Connor McKay, an NCFCA alumni living in Colorado. He competed in the NCFCA for 3 years, and received several awards in Team Policy Debate and IE. He began developing Flowpad in 2004, and it was first used for the Rocky Mountain Classic State Tournament in 2005. Since that time, Flowpad has been rewritten several times and gradually improved to its current form.

Connor graduated in 2013 from the Colorado School of Mines with a B.S. in electrical engineering, and now works full-time for Keysight Technologies as a digital ASIC designer. He continues to develop and support Flowpad in his spare time, along with numerous other software projects.

Rails About Flowpad

Flowpad is written in the Ruby programming language, on top of the Ruby on Rails framework. It is hosted on a virtual private server from Linode, running in a secure datacenter with redundant power, UPS, and cooling systems. The server utilizes RAID-10 to ensure data integrity, and is backed up nightly and weekly.

In the last tournament season alone, Flowpad was used by more than 60 tournaments nationwide. It easily handles massive tournaments with 600+ students, 1000+ judges, and 400+ families. The flexibility of Flowpad has also allowed it to be used for other types of events as well, such as conferences and camps.

If you are interested in using Flowpad or have questions, please email us at support@homeschooldebate.net.