Nearly Ten Years in the Making
Dancesport.app runs ballroom competitions end to end — built by a senior software engineer who competes at national level and scrutineers, over nearly ten years and five attempts. Four of them did not survive. Everything they taught is in the one that did.
Yubing Hou
Founder • Senior Engineer • Dancer • Scrutineer
Yubing has been dancing since 2011 and writing software for this sport almost as long. By profession he is a senior software engineer; he founded Dancesport Software, LLC in 2018, and he is the one behind Dancesport.app — every screen of it. The product exists because he kept meeting the same problem from inside the ballroom, and eventually had the skill to solve it.
“Dancesport.app is the realization of a vision I have carried for nearly ten years — software engineering, UI/UX design, system architecture, ballroom competition, and data analysis, finally in one place. The competition management system is the foundation. There is far more planned on top of it.”
Five Attempts. One That Worked.
Nearly ten years and five attempts went into this. The four that did not survive are the reason the fifth one holds.
2011
It starts on the floor
Social dancing that summer, and competing with the Badger Ballroom Dance Team by the following spring.
2016
The gap
A master’s in software engineering, a hard look at what organizers actually had to work with, and very little that felt modern.
2017—2025
Four attempts
Each reached further than the last: competition setup, then registration, then adjudicator assignment. Each one stopped.
2026
Dancesport.app
The same design, rebuilt on a foundation that holds. This is the one that made it out of the workshop.
It began with a small desktop tool, written in his last semester at UW–Madison, for making sense of a competition’s own results. It worked well enough to expose the real problem: he had the ideas, but not yet the engineering. A master’s degree and a decade of professional work fixed that.
The attempts in between all stopped the same way — a foundation that could not carry what came next. The last of them ran beautifully until it reached the skating system, and then could not be changed without breaking. But nothing across those ten years was ever thrown away: each attempt handed its design to the next one, and Dancesport.app keeps that design while replacing everything underneath it. Four competition systems went into learning how to build this one, and every release since is written up in the release notes.
Engineered, Not Improvised
A hobby project and a professional system are not the same thing. This is the second.
Yubing holds a master’s degree in software engineering and has built software professionally since 2018 — today as a senior software engineer working on systems people depend on.
What that work gave him was not a stack of tools; most of what he uses professionally never appears here. It was judgment: knowing which decisions still hold a year later and which quietly cost you. And it was discipline: designing before building, testing while building, and treating a running system as something people are depending on.
The dancing explains why this product understands a competition. This is why it is built like something meant to last.
What That Decade Bought
Every earlier attempt stopped for a reason worth naming. Here is what each of those reasons is worth to your competition.
It grows with your competition
Four earlier attempts collapsed under their own weight. This one is built in parts that change independently, so new capability arrives without putting what already works at risk.
Reliable on the day
Your competition gets one chance to run well. Everything here is checked as it is built, because the morning of the event is the worst possible time to find a problem.
Designed by someone who competes
Every screen is drawn by a national-level amateur competitor and certified scrutineer who has stood on both sides of the floor — and who has to live with the result at his own competitions.
Shaped by the dance community
Organizers, scrutineers, adjudicators, and dancers have supplied the feedback, ideas, and testing that turned a personal project into a product.
Running the competition is the foundation, not the finished thing. What is planned on top of it is public, on the product roadmap.
Not Built Alone
Friends across the dance community have given an enormous amount along the way — feedback, hints, ideas, testing, inspiration, and guidance. Colleagues over the years taught him the discipline behind a product that has to be reliable on competition day. And most of all, there was the encouragement of his dance partner, Heather. Without all of them, none of this would exist.
Have a question, a correction, or an idea for the system? Write to [email protected].
Built From Inside the Ballroom
This is not software written about ballroom from a distance. Its author is still on the floor.
Yubing has competed since 2012 and dances Standard at the national level. In 2025 he reached the final of Amateur Novice Standard at the United States National Amateur Dancesport Championships, and the final of Amateur Championship Standard at the USA Dance National Ballroom DanceSport Championships.
Along the way: runner-up in Pre-Championship Standard at the Ohio Star Ball, a finalist at the North America Imperial Star Ball, a three-time Amateur Ballroom champion at the Wisconsin State Dancesport Championships, and a winner and finalist at many collegiate competitions.
He is also a certified scrutineer, so he has sat with the marks after the last heat as well — the place where a competition is either sound or is not.
That is why the product looks the way it does. Every screen answers a question he has had to ask himself: as the dancer waiting on a heat list, and as the official responsible for the result.