DEV Community: Adam Cameron Drummond

UK Hackathon Statistics

Adam Cameron Drummond — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 02:03:59 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

hackreport is a pipeline that reads public pages about past UK hackathons and reports on the student-led events season by season. For each event it records the organiser, whether it was student-led, and where available the size and number of projects.

I built it for a colleague of mine who was interested in seeing statistics of events across the year.
The problem: there is no single place showing which UK hackathons are student-run, who ran them, and how big they were, and organiser knowledge gets lost as students graduate.

Demo

Check out the results here!

Code

Check out the folder 0 Weekend here:

AdamDIOM / HacktoberfestOnlineProjects

Run it with ./run.sh. It sets up the environment, starts Ollama, pulls the model if missing, and writes data/report.md and data/events.csv.

How I Built It

Model: Gemma 3 (4B), run locally through Ollama.
Collect: Python collectors read the Hackathons UK season pages and MLH season pages. They then follow each event's own website, plus its About or Team page.
- Requests respect robots.txt, are rate limited, and are cached.
- If a site is dead, the pipeline falls back to the Wayback Machine copy from within the same season.
- Devpost blocks scripted access, so it reads pages you save from a browser.
Extract: Gemma gets each page and returns JSON matching a schema. It is told to use only what the text states and to leave unknowns as null, with temperature 0 and a verbatim evidence quote for each classification.
Guardrails: a 4B model guesses student-led from a university name, so code checks the evidence quote.
- student_led: true needs society or student wording in the quote.
- false needs company or charity wording.
- Anything else is demoted to unclear.
Seasons: seasons run September to August and are named by the ending year (2024 = Sep 2023 to Aug 2024).
Merge and report: events seen in several sources are merged, with the organiser's own site taking priority. The report is a per-season summary plus a CSV.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Cost and repeatability: an open-weight model running locally means a pipeline that reads hundreds of pages costs nothing per call and can be re-run whenever the sources change. This is great as it means there is no per-token cost for a volunteer or student organiser who may not have access to LLMs.
Constrained output: local inference with a JSON schema, temperature 0 and a fixed model version makes extraction reproducible, so anyone can rerun it and check the results.
Honest limits: because the model is small and open, I had to build the evidence checks. That makes every classification traceable to a quote on a page.

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma
Best Use of GitHub Copilot

How the MLH 2022 Season is Gonna Rock!

Adam Cameron Drummond — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:24:42 +0000

What are my plans?

One of my big plans for the 2022 season is to run a hackathon! Be it an MLH member event or not, I would love to run an event and coordinate all elements of a hackathon, be it sponsors, prizes, judging or marketing.

What else am I doing?

Honestly, just vibing. Looking to start at University College Isle of Man to study a BSc in Computer Science. Hopefully some form of internship or computing experiences; travel!

Melons vs Pineapples in BLAHAJgang

Adam Cameron Drummond — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 18:05:31 +0000

Where did the Melons Originate?

The melons originated back in January with the conclusion of Local Hack Day: Build. It was an unexpected event however it has led to become part of the biggest meme of Local Hack Day: Share. It came about when Ryan never thanked BLAHAJ. Jack decided it was important to react with BLAHAJ emotes for every single message in Build chat. I took it upon myself to react with melons. From there, it was war. Every message was a battle to see who could get the most reactions.

Where did the Pineapples Originate?

This all came around because of an April Fools Day Prank on Ryan Swift. Michael (from BLAHAJgang) came up with the idea to prank everyone by chaning from MELONsquad to 🍍PINEAPPLEparty🍍. This culminated in what can only be classed as the most iconic Twitch Stream ever. Find it here!

Why did MELONsquad become part of BLAHAJgang?

Before Local Hack Day: Share, the two leaders decided that it would be more beneficial to have one super-guild rather than two smaller guilds. This has clearly proved to be a success as BLAHAJgang is now top of the leaderboard

Where Can I Join the MELONsquad and 🍍PINEAPPLEparty🍍?

Visit us in Discord by going to https://discord.mlh.io and join the BLAHAJgang guild. Once there, ask for the link to our very own Discord server. Top secret! And that's it!

Being an Influencer at Local Hack Day: Share

Adam Cameron Drummond — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 21:46:25 +0000

About LHD: Share

Local Hack Day: Share is an event run by Major League Hacking. It's a week full of learning, challenges and most importantly, sharing. After all, it is called LHD: SHARE.

Why I Enjoy it so Much

I love LHD, or as some say it should be, Global Hack Week, considering it is now a whole week event. I really enjoy attending this event because

I get to meet so many new people, including both coaches and those taking part in the event, like me.
There is SO MUCH to learn & build during the week!
Guilds like BLAHAJgang help with collaboration across the world.

What is There to Learn?

TONNES! There is something for everyone, be it a simple hello world or developing full stack programs. There's stuff in so many different languages that there has to be something for everyone. Even for non-technical people, there was a workshop just about making a dataset look good.

Why Should YOU Take Part in a Local Hack Day?

LHDs are welcoming to ALL. You should join LHD: Share because you can improve yourself. Be it new connections, learning new things or even just to play some mini events, it is totally worth it!

What is BLAHAJgang?

I'm glad you asked. BLAHAJgang is, as said by the leader, 'MLH's meme of the century'. What does this mean for you? There is gonna be a lot of memeable moments. Some of our events include karaoke, ASMR and a virtual pizza party!

To Conclude

You should join Local Hack Day: Share. Come see the fun we have at BLAHAJgang if you want. We also have thanks MELONsquad

My experience at Local Hack Day: Build

Adam Cameron Drummond — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 15:36:10 +0000

How I started

I entered Local Hack Day as my first hackathon not really knowing much about hackathons - or any of the people from MLH. APIs scared me and I had no idea what Node, Flask, JSON or ZEN was. All I had was my passion to learn and meet new people.

What happened over the week

As the week started I was active on all the socials about MLH and watched the majority of the Twitch streams, being active in the comments and on the Discord. Over this time I have met new contacts and continue to recognise the same names in the chat over multiple streams, and have also taken every opportunity to show off my skills or projects using Twitch, StreamYard (in with the presenters) and YouTube.

The Addiction to Chrome Dino

Since the stream from Jacklyn on Day 2, I have made it my mission to get as many of the MLHers to undertake a live on-stream Chrome Dino game attempt. So far I have had Jack, Chris B and Mara attempt it, each getting scores of 583, 3337 and 469 respectively. I plan to continue this for the rest of the event.

How my Love for BLAHAJ has Developed Over the Week

At the start of the week I had never met BLAHAJ or any of the counterparts. I now know and have lots of love for BLAHAJ and really want one of my own... LHD: Build really leaves a lasting impact.

What I am leaving Local Hack Day: Build with

I am leaving this hackathon with a plethora of new skills and connections. Whilst I still may be scared of APIs, I do at least feel like I know a little bit more about them. My main takeaway from LHD: Build is that I now know how to use GitHub! I feel like I have really learned something with this, and that is quite down to Will's stream on Day 3. Furthermore, I sort of know how to use React and Bootstrap applications thanks to Jack's stream on Day 4.