We are so excited to finally announce the winners of the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge, our celebration of finishing what you started by reviving abandoned side projects, hackathon creations, and long-forgotten repos with help from GitHub Copilot.
First things first: thank you all so much for your patience. We know this announcement took longer than expected, and we're grateful you stuck with us while we gave every submission the careful review it deserved.
The comeback stories you shared were incredible. Your work showed us that no project is ever truly dead, it's just waiting for its second act.
Now, let's celebrate our ten winners!
🎉 Congratulations To…
@lehuygiang28 rebuilt VKara, a browser-based karaoke room app where a shared screen acts as the TV and each guest's phone becomes a remote, merging scattered repos into one monorepo and redesigning the UX around distinct host and guest roles.
@gramli resurrected a 2014 WinForms puzzle game, using the last 7% of his Copilot tokens to port the aging desktop app into a modern, fully playable browser version.
@ishantgupta rebuilt an 18-month-abandoned audit script into git-regret, a polished CLI that scans repo history for leaked secrets and messy fix-chains, then generates Copilot remediation plans to clean them up.
@dj29 revived ShelfTalk, a MERN social platform for book lovers, replacing REST polling with real-time Socket.io chat and shipping brand-new live synchronized reading rooms.
@nupoorshetye rebuilt CodeSynth's fragile core, swapping naive Socket.io sync for Yjs-powered CRDT collaboration and adding a virtual file system and shared whiteboard to turn a hackathon prototype into a real multiplayer coding playground.
@divyesh5981 revived toastr, a 12k-star notification library untouched since 2016, rebuilding it from scratch as toastr-next: zero dependencies, full TypeScript, dark mode, and WCAG accessibility at roughly 4KB gzipped.
@liztacular reframed an abandoned component-search chatbot into Trace, a tool that turns a UI screenshot into a runnable React component grounded in a shadcn catalog, complete with a live sandbox and one-click accessibility fixes.
@botoom rebuilt Uni Route, a 2021 Angular traceroute teaching app, from the ground up in React and Vite by adding hop-by-hop map playback, latency charts, and bilingual support to help students see how packets travel the internet.
@anuththara2007w expanded a 50-line console script into a full Manifest V3 Chrome extension that fingerprints React Server Components and detects the React2Shell vulnerability class across four detection vectors with persistent storage.
@omarafifi matured Daphq from a fragile v1 into a polished cross-platform file-transfer engine, adding UDP auto-discovery, socket backpressure, and OS integrations to push LAN transfers to roughly 90% bandwidth saturation.
Prizes
All ten winners will receive:
- $300 USD
- DEV++ Membership
- Exclusive DEV Badge
The DEV Team will reach out to winners next week to coordinate prizes.
All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.
What's Next?
We have two new challenges coming down the pipeline. Make sure to follow the tags below to stay up to date with the announcements.
Thank you again to everyone who dusted off an old project and gave it the ending it deserved, and thank you to GitHub for partnering with us on this challenge.
Happy coding! đź’ś
Top comments (1)
Honestly still processing this! 🤯 Seeing Daphq make the top 10 alongside such an impressive lineup is incredible. Pushing that bare-metal performance was a massive grind, and it feels awesome to see it recognized.
Huge congrats to everyone who participated—the comeback stories in this thread are pure gold.
Huge thanks to the DEV and GitHub teams for organizing this! đź’ś