Jess Lee

for The DEV Team

Posted on Jul 1 • Edited on Jul 17

Reflect and Share Your World's Largest Hackathon Journey: Writing Challenge Now Open 🌟

#wlhchallenge #devchallenge #ai #startup

The building period for the World's Largest Hackathon has officially wrapped up, and what an incredible month it was! With over 130,000 builders registered, this event truly lived up to its name as a launchpad for the next generation of creators.

Now it's time to reflect, share, and celebrate the journey. Running through July 31, the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge offers everyone a chance to document their building experience and share it with the community.

Maybe you joined your first hackathon team, discovered the power of AI-assisted development, or found that your project took on a life of its own beyond any competition. Each of our three prompts captures a different aspect of the WLH experience, giving you the freedom to share what mattered most to you.

Read on for the prompts!

Our Prompts

Building with Bolt

Share your project development experience and technical journey. You might cover what you built, how Bolt.new transformed your development process, any sponsor challenges you tackled, favorite code snippets or prompts, or how AI-powered development changed your approach to building.

Building with Bolt Submission Template

Beyond the Code

Tell us about the human side of your hackathon experience. You might cover your team collaboration dynamics, IRL events you attended, connections you made, mentors who helped you, community moments that stood out, networking experiences, or shout-outs to people who made your hackathon memorable.

Beyond the Code Submission Template

After the Hack

Share what's next for you and your project, and reflect on what you learned. Whether you're continuing development, launching a startup, or found that building became more important than competing, tell us about your future plans, personal transformation, skills gained, or how this month of creation changed your trajectory.

After the Hack Submission Template

Judging Criteria and Prizes

All prompts will be judged on the following:

Style and presentation
Clarity
Originality

There will be at least one winner per prompt, and each winner will receive an exclusive DEV badge. All valid submissions will earn a completion badge.

How To Participate

In order to participate, you will need to publish a post using the submission template associated with each prompt.

Please review our full rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contests rules such eligibility requirements.

Prizing Update: We'll be awarding prizes to ten talented writers:

We're adding prizes to the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge!

Jess Lee ・ Jul 17

#wlhchallenge #devchallenge #ai #startup

Important Dates

July 01: World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge begins!
July 31: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
August 21: Winners Announced

We hope you enjoy this opportunity to reflect on your building journey and share your story with the community. Questions about the challenge? Ask them below.

Good luck and happy writing!

Top comments (26)

Peter Kim Frank The DEV Team • Jul 1

This has been an epic hackathon that brought a bunch of new builders into the ecosystem. Look forward to reading the reflections and learnings, especially from folks that are brand new to building with software.

Ben Halpern The DEV Team • Jul 1

Good luck to everyone! And welcome to DEV for new folks.

dahmzy13 • Jul 18 • Edited

Just wrapped up my hackathon post on the experience building OSERIN, an emergency response platform for Nigerians that connects people to the nearest ambulance and hospital, even on low bandwidth. Excited to share what I built and the lessons learned along the way using Bolt!

Check it out here: (dev.to/dahmzy13/oserin-emergency-r...)

Thank you to Bolt and DEV for giving me the opportunity to impact over 200M Nigerians who face this issue everyday.

Pradeep Patel • Jul 26

Amazing 😍

Nathan Tarbert • Jul 1

super cool, just seeing how many builders came together is next level
i’m curious what surprised you most about working with such a massive group

Besworks • Jul 2

I've been too busy hacking away to write here lately but I'll definitely be submitting something for this! Can't wait for the Devpost project gallery to open up for this hackathon too, I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of interesting projects.

Aima Atigari • Jul 9

Totally understand you mate

Angel • Jul 4

It was a pleasure to learn from the bests, to grow as a dev and a creator, and to surround myself with people who also believe in building the future one insane idea at a time.

Much love to all the entrepreneurs, tinkerers, late night coders and pixel warriors out here. And Good luck with Hackathon Results :)

Aishwarya Dixit • Jul 12

Building with Bolt: My AI-Powered Development Journey
Building with Bolt has been an exciting learning journey! As someone new to coding, I explored ideas like a personal CRM, journaling app, and more—all with the help of Bolt. What started as curiosity turned into real projects, thanks to Bolt’s AI-powered development tools. It's not just a platform, it's a spark for creativity. No limits, just possibilities.

Technical Journey Bolt helped me:

Kickstart faster with pre-built components and AI-generated code
Debug efficiently using natural language prompts to explain issues
Iterate quickly with real-time previews and smart suggestions

One of my favorite moments? Prompting Bolt with: I simply typed a one-word prompt, and Bolt instantly generated a beautiful websites & apps —organized by tags, color-coded, and cleanly styled—in just seconds! One of my favorite experiences was the curiosity it sparked; it made me want to build more and more. I absolutely loved it!

Challenges I Faced While Using Bolt. New :

1- State Management: As a beginner, handling context across components was tricky. I had to refactor how data flowed between them. Thankfully, Bolt’s AI suggestions helped modularize the logic and improve code readability.

2-Deployment Config: Faced an issue with CORS – Bolt's AI chat helped resolve it with a clear explanation and code block.

3- Understanding AI Prompts: At times, I struggled to frame the right prompt to get the exact output I wanted. But trial and error helped me learn fast, and now I'm more confident using prompts effectively.

Why Bolt Changed My Workflow
I no longer start from scratch—I start with AI + my idea. Instead of hours of boilerplate, I focus on logic and creativity. Bolt feels like a pair programmer who doesn’t sleep.

Thanks to the Bolt team and community—your product allowed me to ship faster, learn better, and stay inspired.