We are excited to announce the winners of our DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition!
We asked you to build something in the spirit of generosity and left the interpretation wide open. Over one weekend you built grant radars that refuse to trust their own model, a hospital night shift where your starting money was left by the last player, and matchmakers that turn three boxes of storybooks into an actual plan.
Thank you to everyone who participated. Short challenges ask a lot in very little time, and it showed in the best way.
Now, let's celebrate our winners!
🎉 Congratulations To…
Overall Winner
@zkasuran built Keepalive, a tool that computes the sustainability of 579,178 US nonprofits straight from their own tax returns. The findings sugges the most common metric for choosing which charities to give to (how little they spend on fundraising) point not to efficiency but to a shorter life span. It's a project that reframed our idea of charity in a meaningful way.
Best Use of Snowflake
@emmasofia built FoodBridge, a food rescue grid that matches businesses with excess food with nearby shelters that need it, before the food spoils. Snowflake does real work here rather than sitting underneath as storage: window functions rank perishable batches by urgency, micro-partition clustering keeps dispatch queries fast on a volunteer driver's phone, and EPA WARM calculations turn every rescued pound into auditable carbon data.
Best Use of ElevenLabs
@sarvar_04 built ReachAloud, which turns written emergency alerts into spoken audio in any language for the people that text-only warnings leave behind. The voice is not a feature bolted on the side, it is the entire product, and the accessibility work impressed us: an emergency broadcast mode that serves low vision and low hearing at the same time, and a service worker that keeps the alerts playing when the network is gone.
Best Use of Google AI
@ujja built PadForward, a community network for finding and donating menstrual products in public places, born from a very ordinary moment at a train station. Gemini is an agent here rather than a chatbot, calling validated application tools to route donations where the need score is highest, reading supply levels off a photo of a donation box, and degrading through on-device AI and plain heuristics when the network drops.
Best Use of Solana
@yashksaini built Cairn, which changes who issues the receipt for a donation. Funds unlock only when the recipient signs, and that signature carries the hash of a recording where they say what they received. The separation of authorization from testimony is a careful piece of design, and keeping one implementation of the hash function compiled for both chain and client is the sort of thing you only notice when it is missing.
Prizes
All five winners will receive:
- $200 USD
- DEV++ Membership
- Exclusive DEV badge
All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.
What's Next?
Hacktoberfest is here, and we're launching events all month that center open-weight models and open-source AI.
We're kicking the month off with the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge, launching later tonight. Register now so you don't miss the announcement:
Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge
October 02, 2026The Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge runs October 1 to October 5. Build something with open-source AI at its core that solves a real problem for a friend or someone you love. $2,450 in prizes across 17 winners. This is the first of five Hacktoberfest challenges on DEV. Every challenge uses the same prompt, with a new theme revealed each Monday in October.
We also have two other challenges happening right now:
You can always find everything running at the moment on our challenges page.
Thanks again to everyone who built something generous with us 💜
Top comments (9)
Congrats to the Winners @zkasuran, @emmasofia, @sarvar_04, @ujja and @yashksaini!!!
Very well done and thanks for expressing your generosity in this challenge :)
Thanks so much! 💜 Had a lot of fun building this one, and congrats to all the other winners! 🎉
Thank you so much 😊
Thank you to everyone who showed their interest and support. Didn't believe I made it in Best use of solana. All nighters that i pulled finally paid off.
Congrats to the winners! 🏆
All cool projects 🥰
Thank You So Much @heyitsjem ❤️
ha mannnnnnn i did not win whatever i learn a bunch congrat to all winner
Thank you so much @heyitsjem
My 2nd win overall here.
Congrats！