DEV Community: The DEV Team

What was your win this week??

Jess Lee — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋
Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?
All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Made someone laugh when they really needed it 😂

Happy Friday!

Join our DEV Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition! $1,000 in Prizes Across FIVE Winners. Submissions Due August 17 at 6:59 AM UTC.

Jem — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:00:00 +0000

We're back with another DEV Weekend Challenge, a short bite-sized challenge planned to fit into your weekend. We know the submission window is tight, so we've set the timing to ensure that no matter where you are in the world, you'll have the majority of your Saturday and Sunday to participate.

International Dog Day is coming up on August 26, so this weekend we're handing the keyboard over to our best friends. 🐕

We'll select one overall winner and four prize category winners who utilize a specific technology as part of their challenge submission.

Let's get to it!

Our Prompt

Build something for, about, or inspired by dogs.

Please interpret this prompt however you'd like. A training log for a new puppy? A breed identifier? A generative art piece built from the silhouette of your own dog? A game where you are the dog? Any angle is fair game, and we have no objection to submissions honoring cats, lizards, or ferrets who happen to live with a dog.

Prize Categories

Alongside our overall winner spot, we have four prize categories for participants who incorporate a specific technology into their project. You don't need to use any of these tools to be eligible for the overall winner spot, but if you're curious about any of the tech, this is a great excuse to give one a try.

Best use of Snowflake
Best use of Solana
Best use of ElevenLabs
Best use of Google AI

Pro Tip: since prize category winners are drawn from a smaller pool of submissions, your odds of taking home a prize are meaningfully higher.

Note: You may use multiple technologies in a single submission to qualify for multiple categories, but participants are limited to one win per challenge.

Judging Criteria

All submissions will be judged on the following:

Relevance to Theme: Does the project clearly connect to the challenge theme?
Creativity: Is the concept original or is it an interesting take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Is the project functional, well-built, and easy to use?
Writing Quality: Is the submission post clearly written and engaging?
Use of Prize Category Technology (optional): If pursuing a prize category, does the submission meaningfully incorporate the chosen technology?

Prizes

Five winners will each take home:

$200 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template below. Your post should give us an overview of what you built, why you built it, and a demo of your project.

Weekend Challenge Submission Template

Challenge Guidelines

A few rules to keep in mind, in line with our recent challenge program updates:

One submission per person. This challenge has a single prompt, so you get one submission. A single project can still qualify for as many prize categories as you'd like.
New projects only. Your project needs to be built within the challenge window. Please don't dust off something you built last spring.
Nothing after the deadline counts. We review commit history as part of judging. If you keep building after submissions close, note in your readme what happened before the deadline and what came after, or the submission may be disqualified.

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules such as eligibility requirements.

Need Help?

Check out our official challenge page for resources to help you get started with tech from our prize category partners.

Important Dates

Launch Time: August 14, 2026 2:00 AM UTC
Submissions Due: August 17, 2026 6:59 AM UTC

Here's what that looks like across a few timezones:

Timezone	Launch Time (Local)	Submissions Due (Local)
PDT	Thursday, Aug 13 at 7:00 PM	Sunday, Aug 16 at 11:59 PM
EDT	Thursday, Aug 13 at 10:00 PM	Monday, Aug 17 at 2:59 AM
GMT	Friday, Aug 14 at 2:00 AM	Monday, Aug 17 at 6:59 AM
CEST	Friday, Aug 14 at 4:00 AM	Monday, Aug 17 at 8:59 AM
IST	Friday, Aug 14 at 7:30 AM	Monday, Aug 17 at 12:29 PM
JST	Friday, Aug 14 at 11:00 AM	Monday, Aug 17 at 3:59 PM
AEST	Friday, Aug 14 at 12:00 PM	Monday, Aug 17 at 4:59 PM

Winners will be Announced on Thursday, September 10.

Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Good luck!!

Welcome Thread - v388

Sloan the DEV Moderator — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Leave a comment below to introduce yourself! You can talk about what brought you here, what you're learning, or just a fun fact about
yourself.
Reply to someone's comment, either with a question or just a hello. 👋

Come back next week to greet our new members so you can one day earn our Warm Welcome Badge!

Hey all! I’m Jem, the DEV Community Program Coordinator

Jem — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:13:30 +0000

It feels good to finally be writing this.

I've been working part-time behind the scenes at DEV for almost two years managing social accounts, handling support, and helping with moderation. Earlier this year I stepped into a more curatorial role as the Community Program Coordinator where I work alongside @jess, helping with editorial stuff and DEV Challenges. The past few months we’ve been interviewing for a full-time Community Program Manager, and I’m super excited to have someone new on the team to grow our community programs. Moving forward, I'll be taking on the weekly Top 7 and Challenge Announcement posts, so expect to be hearing from me more frequently :)

When I’m not working for DEV, I'm pursuing a graduate degree, learning how to build interactive experiences at the intersection of music, video games, media theory, and poetry. I also teach design principles and introductory HTML/CSS to undergraduates at CUNY Hunter, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about how people encounter new ideas for the first time.

The reason I find DEV such an exciting place to be is summed up well by @kernelpryanic in a post from April:

I don't think all hand-written code is art, just as not every handmade object is. But I do think the category is emerging.

Code has always been both tool and art form, and this community feels like a place where both can grow and thrive. I’ve always thought the overlap of technical expertise and creative curiosity is where the real exciting stuff happens, and I feel lucky to be in a position to help elevate the voices that live in that space.

What was your win this week?

Jess Lee — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋
Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?
All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Started something you've been "about to start" for two months 🏁

Happy Friday!

General Challenge Updates Moving Forward

dev.to staff — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:27:14 +0000

Hey all, as part of our expanding challenge program we want to update and clarify some challenge requirements moving forward. First off, we want to express our gratitude for the dedication and effort you have put into your submissions. This has been one of our busiest years yet in terms of challenge participation, and it’s the enthusiasm you put into your work that makes these events a joy to run. Thank you for that!

Now, onto some housekeeping. We hope the following clarifications will not only streamline our process, but make things easier and more fair for all who participate.

Please note: These announcements only apply to challenges announced after this post, so these changes do not apply to the Bug Smash or Frontend Challenge: Comfort Food Edition that are currently ongoing.

One Submission Per Prompt

For future challenges, our default rule will be one submission per person per prompt. You may still qualify for multiple prize categories as part of one submission, but we want participants to focus their efforts into projects and posts of very high quality rather than getting distracted with multiple submissions. There will be exceptions to this rule but if there is an exception, we will let the community know in the announcement post and FAQ section. Otherwise, we default to one submission per prompt. If there is a writing prompt and a build prompt for a challenge, you may continue submitting to each of those prompts, once. Folks who repeatedly break this rule will not be eligible to win.

New Projects Please

We also wanted to take this moment and clarify that projects need to be created within the timeframe of the challenge unless specifically stated otherwise (for example, the current Bug Smash and recent Github “Finish-Up-A-Thon” would not have this rule since they explicitly allow for existing projects). We will clarify when there are exceptions to this rule.

Judging Period

We also realize that it can be frustrating to stop working on a project while waiting for the judging period, especially since we have extended our judging period window recently. That said, folks can update the readme of their projects to state what they did before and after the challenge. We will not consider anything committed after the challenge submission deadline. We will be double checking this as part of our process. If we see commits after the deadline, we will look for your notes in your readme or you’ll be disqualified.

Thank you all for making these recent challenges some of our most participated in yet. We hope these guidelines make things clearer and fairer for all involved.

With all that said, be sure to register for our upcoming challenges launching soon:

Our next Weekend Challenge is coming up! As always the prompt will be revealed at launch. Register with the sign up button to be notified when it drops. When it does, you'll have the weekend to build and submit. That's it! Because our community spans every timezone on the planet, we've set the window so that everyone around the world gets at least a full weekend to participate.

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

Happy coding!

Welcome Thread - v387

Sloan the DEV Moderator — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Leave a comment below to introduce yourself! You can talk about what brought you here, what you're learning, or just a fun fact about
yourself.
Reply to someone's comment, either with a question or just a hello. 👋

Come back next week to greet our new members so you can one day earn our Warm Welcome Badge!

What was your win this week?

Jess Lee — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋
Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?
All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Turned off notifications for an hour and didn't spontaneously combust 🔕

Happy Friday!

Congrats to the DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition Winners!

Jess Lee — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:24:25 +0000

We are excited to announce the winners of our DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition!

The prompt was simple and wide open: build something inspired by passion. You gave us rivalries, obsessions, fandoms, late-night side projects, and love letters to the things you cannot stop thinking about, and you built all of it inside a single weekend.

Thank you to everyone who submitted. These projects were a joy to work through, and choosing five winners out of this pool was genuinely difficult.

Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition Submission

Sohee Lee

Jul 12

Myeongdong 3D — I built a talking 3D copy of my favourite Seoul district

#weekendchallenge #devchallenge #ai #webdev

5 min read

@gracelee087 built Myeongdong 3D, a GPS walking audio guide to Seoul's most-loved district, set inside a hand-built 3D copy of the real place. Seoul has no public photorealistic 3D data, so they extruded 3,535 real OpenStreetMap building footprints in Three.js at true metre scale and routed the walk over the actual street graph, with live Seoul weather and sun position. Their guide is named Tobaggi, the Korean word for someone born and raised in a neighbourhood who never left, and that is the whole spirit of this one.

Best Use of Snowflake

DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition Submission

Soumyadeep Dey

Jul 12

We Taught a Snowflake Warehouse to Judge World Cup Conviction and Write the Verdict Back to Solana

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #snowflake #100daysofsolana

15 min read

@soumyadeepdey and @dronzer2code built FERVOR, a conviction oracle for World Cup fandom that refuses to measure hype, because following a crowd is cheap. It measures the wallet that keeps buying its country's token while the price bleeds, and Snowflake does the work a blockchain cannot do about its own history: a seven-table Dynamic Tables DAG at one-minute lag, Cortex models retraining every five minutes, and an eight-tab dashboard running as Streamlit inside the warehouse. Every five minutes the computed index is signed and written back to Solana as a confirmed transaction, which means Snowflake output ends up living on a block explorer.

Best Use of Solana

DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition Submission

Monika Sadlok

Jul 12

Stellamint — a message to the stars, and proof of the night you looked up

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #solana #snowflake

4 min read

@msadlok built Stellamint, an app about the oldest passion we have: looking up and wondering if anyone is looking back. Write a message to a real exoplanet and watch how many years it will travel at lightspeed, or mark the celestial event overhead right now and mint a proof of the moment. Every message and proof is a Solana asset with no database anywhere in the project, so your wallet's on-chain assets are the collection and the sky map is rendered purely by reading them back.

Best Use of ElevenLabs

DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition Submission

İclal Doğan

Jul 13

ECHOLALIA: A Haunted Desktop Where Two AI Voices Finish Writing You

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge

7 min read

@iclaldogan built ECHOLALIA, a psychological horror art simulation staged as a haunted desktop at 3:33 AM, where two AI voices start your manuscript for you and slowly take the keyboard away. ElevenLabs is why it demands headphones: CRITIC and MUSE are panned hard left and right so the argument physically happens on either side of your head and the Sound Effects API conjures the noises your own sentences describe. Bring headphones and answer honestly.

Best Use of Google AI

DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition Submission

JonathanSolvesProblems

Jul 12

Passion is the one thing you are not supposed to be able to fake. So I built a machine that manufactures it.

#showdev #devchallenge #weekendchallenge #ai

11 min read

@jonathansolvesstuff built Pick Your Side, for everyone who watched the World Cup without a team: name any two nations and it reads their real history, picks the side you were always meant to love, and a stadium announcer swears you in. Manufactured passion only works if the thing it is built out of is true, so Gemini never works from memory. One call runs grounded in Google Search to establish checkable facts, a second writes the case using only those facts, and the app shows you every search it ran and every page it read.

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?

Join our latest Frontend Challenge: Comfort Food Edition.

Features a CSS art prompt

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Jul 29

Join our latest Frontend Challenge: Comfort Food Edition 🍲

#devchallenge #frontendchallenge #css #javascript

121

4 min read

Our Big Summer Bug Smash powered by Sentry is your chance to fix your biggest bugs and be rewarded for it.

Congrats again to our winners, and thank you to everyone who spent their weekend building something they care about 💜

Join our latest Frontend Challenge: Comfort Food Edition 🍲

Jess Lee — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:18:58 +0000

We're back with another Frontend Challenge, and this time we're hungry! 🍜🥧

Running through August 16, Frontend Challenge: Comfort Food Edition invites you to build something inspired by the food that makes you feel at home.

Show off the dish you make when nothing else will do, build a site for a restaurant that exists (or one that only lives in your head), share the recipe you've been perfecting for years, or put a spotlight on a regional dish that deserves more attention. Whether you're a CSS connoisseur, a JavaScript chef, or somewhere in between, there's a prompt here for you.

We hope you give it a try!

The Prompts

CSS Art: Comfort Food

Create a work of art using primarily CSS! Let food be your inspiration: a steaming bowl of ramen, a stack of pancakes, a perfectly cut slice of pie, or the dish you grew up eating.

CSS Art Submission Template

Note: We're now allowing a sprinkle of JavaScript in CSS Art submissions! However, judging will continue to focus primarily on the CSS component, so keep JavaScript usage light and purposeful. The star of the show should still be your CSS skills.

Perfect Landing: Comfort Food

Build a polished, functional landing page with a food theme. This could be a real or imaginary restaurant, a recipe collection, a food festival, a love letter to a regional dish, or anything else you can imagine, as long as it captures the theme and demonstrates excellent frontend fundamentals.

Perfect Landing Submission Template

Note: You may use JavaScript, TypeScript, Dart, WebAssembly, or any other browser-compatible language/runtime in your Perfect Landing submissions! Show us what modern web development can do.

Judging Criteria and Prizes

CSS Art submissions will be evaluated on:

Creativity
Effective Use of CSS
Aesthetic Outcome

Perfect Landing submissions will be evaluated on:

Accessibility
Usability and User Experience
Creativity
Code quality

Prizes

Each prompt winner will receive a DEV++ Membership and an exclusive DEV Badge. All Participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.

How To Participate

Publish a post using the submission template provided above and required #frontendchallenge tag. You can submit to one or both prompts, and you can make multiple submissions per prompt (just publish a separate post for each).

You can level up your post by embedding your project directly in your submission. Embeds to consider:

Google Cloud Run: {% embed cloud_run_link %}
CodePen: {% codepen https://... %}

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules such as eligibility requirements.

Important Dates

July 29: Frontend Challenge: Comfort Food Edition begins! 🍲
August 16: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
September 10: Winners Announced

We can't wait to see what you cook up! Questions about the challenge? Ask them below.

Happy coding!

DEV Community: The DEV Team

What was your win this week??

Join our DEV Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition! $1,000 in Prizes Across FIVE Winners. Submissions Due August 17 at 6:59 AM UTC.

Our Prompt

Prize Categories

Judging Criteria

Prizes

How To Participate

Challenge Guidelines

Need Help?

Important Dates

Welcome Thread - v388

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

Hey all! I’m Jem, the DEV Community Program Coordinator

What was your win this week?

General Challenge Updates Moving Forward

One Submission Per Prompt

New Projects Please

Judging Period

Welcome Thread - v387

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

What was your win this week?

Congrats to the DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition Winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Best Use of Snowflake

Best Use of Solana

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Best Use of Google AI

Prizes

What's Next?

Join our latest Frontend Challenge: Comfort Food Edition 🍲

The Prompts

CSS Art: Comfort Food

Perfect Landing: Comfort Food

Judging Criteria and Prizes

Prizes

How To Participate

Important Dates