2025 WeCoded Challenge
A Celebration of Gender Equity in Software Development
We're excited to announce the launch of our first-ever WeCoded Challenge—a new way to celebrate diversity, inclusion, and empowerment in the tech industry!
The Evolution from SheCoded to WeCoded
Since 2018, DEV has celebrated International Women's Day with SheCoded, a call to action for the community to share powerful stories from women in tech about their journeys, challenges, and triumphs. What began as a platform for women's voices naturally evolved into WeCoded in 2023 —an inclusive space that amplifies all underrepresented and marginalized voices in our industry.
This evolution reflects our commitment to creating a community where everyone can see themselves represented, share their experiences, and find inspiration. WeCoded builds on the foundation of SheCoded while expanding our celebration to embrace the rich diversity of perspectives that make our community stronger.
For 2025, we're taking WeCoded to the next level by transforming it into a DEV Challenge format for the first time. We hope this allows even more community members to participate, whether by sharing personal stories or showcasing technical skills—creating more opportunities for voices to be heard and the overall importance of diversity and inclusion to be recognized.
Running through April 6, the WeCoded Challenge offers two distinct prompts for you to showcase your creativity, share your experiences, and see your work featured as part of our permanent celebration!
All winners will receive:
- 6-month DEV++ Membership
- Exclusive DEV Badge
- A gift from the DEV Shop
The winning design for our Celebrate in Code prompt will be used as the official WeCoded landing page after the challenge wraps!
Key Dates
- Contest start: March 05, 2025
- Submissions due: April 06, 2025
- Winners announced: April 17, 2025
Badge Rewards
Challenge Prompts
Echoes of Experience
Share your personal journey or the stories you've witnessed in the tech industry—highlighting challenges, triumphs, and insights. Your reflections should inspire and empower underrepresented individuals on similar paths or educate allies on how to foster a more inclusive industry.
How to submit
In order to participate, you will need to publish a post using the associated submission template below.
Judging Criteria:
- Style and Presentation
- Clarity
- Originality
Celebrate in Code
Create a dynamic and engaging landing page for dev.to/wecoded — a permanent home for our annual WeCoded celebration.
How to submit
In order to participate, you will need to publish a post using the associated submission template below.
Your design should highlight past WeCoded and SheCoded submissions, pulling in important and inspiring stories from underrepresented voices in tech. You are welcome to include additional information around the history of WeCoded, International Women's Day, additional resources, and anything else that may be applicable to our celebration topic.
We encourage you to use the DEV Articles API to dynamically display content and craft an experience that celebrates the ongoing impact of these stories.
Example of how to access wecoded posts from the API:
window.fetch('https://dev.to/api/articles?tag=wecoded')
.then(response => response.json()) // Parse the JSON from the response
.then(data => {
console.log(data)
});
Outside of the DEV API requests, your submission should be frontend only.
We encourage you to utilize our assets to build on our established WeCoded design:
- WeCoded Logo
- Colors:
- Blue: #4531EA
- Green: #CCEA71
- Purple: #9D00E5
- Gradient
- Icon 1
- Icon 2
Important Note: By participating in this challenge, you agree that if your submission is selected as a winner, DEV may use, modify, and host your code as the official landing page for WeCoded. You retain full ownership of your work, and this agreement does not restrict how you use or share it elsewhere. Additionally, you confirm that your submission is your own original work and does not infringe on any third-party rights.
Since your submission may be used as the official landing page for WeCoded, be sure to include your own information on the page so you are properly recognized as the page creator!
Judging Criteria:
- Accessibility
- Usability and User Experience
- Creativity
- Code quality
2025 WeCoded Challenge FAQ
Participation
Can I submit to multiple prompts?
Yes, you are welcome to submit to multiple prompts.
Can one submission qualify for multiple prompts?
No, each submission only qualifies for one prompt.
Can I submit to a prompt more than once?
Yes, you can submit multiple submissions per prompt but you’ll need to publish a separate post for each submission.
- In the event that you may win two or more prompts, and your submission is very close with another participant, we will favor the other participant.
- In the event that you do win two or more prompts, you will only receive one winner badge.
Can I work on a team?
You can work on teams of up to four people for the Celebrate in Code prompt only.
- If you collaborate with anyone, you’ll need to list their DEV handles in your submission post so we can award a badge to your entire team! Please only publish one submission per team.
- DEV does not handle prize-splitting, so in the event that your submission wins the shop gift, you will need to split that amongst yourselves. Thank you for understanding!
How old do I have to be to participate?
Participants need to be 18+ in order to participate.
If I live in X, am I eligible to participate?
For eligibility rules, see our official challenge rules.
Submission
Can my submission include open source code?
Riffing on open source code and borrowing and improving on previous work/ideas is encouraged but it’s important your changes are significant enough to ensure your submission is valid.
When does riffing become plagiarism?
It will depend, but transparency is important, license compatibility is important. You can use someone else’s code to give you a jumpstart to demonstrate your ideas on top of someone else’s base, but not just re-package the base. It should be clear to the judges what you added to the project in terms of the code and conceptual inspiration. This means, you should clearly state what you were building on and what elements are original to this new submission. When building on existing code, we expect a significant change that adds something tangible to the output. i.e. a new animation, and new sprite, a new function, a new presentation. Not just changes to the source - i.e. changing colours, changing one sprite, changing one function.
What happens if my submission is considered plagiarized or invalid?
Anything deemed to be plagiarism will not be eligible for prizes. Incidental plagiarism may simply result in your disqualification from the challenge (regardless of the number of other valid submissions you have published). Egregious plagiarism will result in your suspension from DEV entirely. Any non-generic, non-trivial usage of prior work, including open source code must be credited in your submission.
Do submissions have to be in English?
Non-english submissions are eligible for a completion badge but not eligible for prizes due to the current limitations of our judges. We will not be judging on mastery of the English language, so please don’t let this deter you from submitting if you are not a native English speaker! We hope to evolve this in the future to be more accommodating.
Do I need a license for my code?
You are not required to license your code but we strongly recommend that you do. Here are some you may consider: MIT, Apache, BSD-2, BSD-3, or Commons Clause.
Can I use AI?
Use of AI is allowed as long as all other rules are followed. We want to give you a chance to show off your skills in realistic scenarios. If you use AI tools to help you achieve your submission, all the power to you.
How do I embed my project directly into my DEV post?
Our editor supports many types of embeds, including: Stackbliz, Glitch, Github, etc. You can typically use the {% embed https://... %} syntax directly in the post. Click here for more information on our markdown support.
- For CodePen, you will need to use this syntax:
{% codepen http://... %} - For CodeSandbox, you will need to use this syntax:
{% codesandbox http://... %}
Judging and Prizing
Can there be ties?
In the event of a tie in scoring between judges, the judges will select the entry that received the highest number of positive reactions on their DEV post to determine the winner.
How will I know if I won?
Winners will be announced in a DEV post on the winner announcement date noted in our key dates section.
When will winners receive their Forem Shop gift?
The DEV Team will contact you via the email associated with your DEV profile within, at most, 10 business days of the announcement date to share the details of the shop gift.
When will I receive my DEV badge?
Both participation and winner badges will be awarded, in most cases, the same day as the winner announcement.
When will I receive my prizes? The DEV Team will contact you via the email associated with your DEV profile within, at most, 10 business days of the announcement date to share the details of claiming your prizes.
2025 WeCoded Challenge Rules
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to 18+. Contest entry period ends April 06, 2025 at 11:59 PM PDT. Contest is void where prohibited or restricted by law or regulation. All entires must be submitted during the content period. For Official Rules, see WeCoded Challenge Contest Rules and General Contest Official Rules.
