DEV Community: The DEV Team

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass Winners!

Jem — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:38:26 +0000

We are so excited to announce the winners of the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass!

It was another week of record-breaking turnout, topping last week's Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge. Thank you all for helping us make these challenges such a success.

Our Touch Grass theme asked you to build something with open-source AI at its core that gets people off the screen and into the world, and you delivered. We saw a laptop that sends you outside the moment the power cuts out, a field app that turns a walk into an investigation where you go out with a question and come back with evidence, a kids' plant treasure hunt that will never let poison ivy count as a win, and more than a few apps whose whole goal was to get you to put them down. Many of you took your projects outside and told us how it went, which made reviewing your builds a blast.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Your builds made a strong case for why open innovation matters, from models running locally with no signal to tools that keep your data on your own device.

Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Mike Kim

Oct 6

Paper Trail: Gemma writes your walk a field card, then the screen goes away

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

6 min read

Featured Category Winners

Best Use of Render

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Tanay

Oct 11

Golden Hour: an open model that finds your 40 minutes outside, and where to spend them

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

7 min read

Best Use of TabPFN

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Biprayan Choudhuri

Oct 12

Turnaround: an open-source hiking buddy that knows when you should turn back, and tells someone if you don't come home

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource #ai

9 min read

Best Use of Tinker

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Soumyadeep Dey

Oct 10

I Distilled a 397B Model Into a 4B One for $1.60. It Now Catches 28 of 33 Park Alerts That Should Stop Your Hike.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

19 min read

Best Use of Arduino

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Utsav bhattarai

Oct 11

I Won an Arduino UNO Q at a Hack Day. Now I'm Building a Device to Help Me Touch Grass

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

7 min read

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Souvik Biswas

Oct 10

Leaf Peep: an open model reads the trees, so you know where to walk this weekend

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #digitalocean

7 min read

Best Use of Gemma

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Ansh Saini

Oct 10

Grow a Song: my run wrote its own soundtrack, with Gemma running on my phone

#hf26challenge #devchallenge #ai #ios

6 min read

Partner Category Winners

Best Use of Backboard

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Dariusz Dumnicki

Oct 11

Weekend Micro-Adventure

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

7 min read

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

-e.h.

Oct 12

Outside: I built a meditation app whose only goal is to make you stop looking at it

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

6 min read

Best Use of Entire

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Changsu Seong

Oct 9

Should I Go Out? A Local Gemma Agent That Picks One Outdoor Plan, Then Tells You to Put Your Phone Away

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

11 min read

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Yuvan Shankar M

Oct 12

Touch Grass Garden: a plant tracker that only counts the days you went outside

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #opensource

7 min read

Best Use of Mastra

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Asi

Oct 11

Your photo picks the next street: a walking mystery on open-weight Gemma

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #opensource

20 min read

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Aryan Sethi

Oct 10

LumiRoam: the tour guide for beginner photographers

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #photography

11 min read

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Antonia Herrera

Oct 11

I asked Gemma to turn “I'm too tired” into “glad I went out” 🚶‍♀️

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource #ai

15 min read

Best Use of SerpApi

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Nikitha Kishore Avadootha

Oct 12

I Made Walking a Game: Quests, a Diary, and an App That Judges Your Screen Time

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #serpapi

8 min read

Best Use of Temporal

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

CodersAcademy006

Oct 10

Butterflies don't take weekends off: 40,000 Pune sightings and a forecast that fell apart when I removed one column

#hf26challenge #devchallenge

9 min read

Best Use of Tiger Data

Anish Kumar

Oct 6

Nice Out: an app that learns your kind of nice weather, then tells you to go outside

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource #ai

5 min read

Prizes

Our overall winner will receive:

$250 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV badge

Our six featured category winners will each receive:

$200 USD
Exclusive DEV badge

Our ten partner category winners will each receive:

$100 USD
Exclusive DEV badge

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

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

What's Next?

Hacktoberfest isn't over yet! Week 2: Side Hustle is happening now, and there's still time to enter:

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 12

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Side Hustle! $2,550 in Prizes Across 18 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #softwaredevelopment

211

8 min read

Week 3 kicks off Monday, October 19, and Week 4 follows on Monday, October 26. Every challenge is a fresh start, so make sure to register so you don't miss an update:

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

See you next week 💚

What was your win this week?!

Jess Lee — Fri, 16 Oct 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
Nailing a new recipe on the first try 🍝

Happy Friday!

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Side Hustle! $2,550 in Prizes Across 18 Winners.

Jem — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:01:08 +0000

Week 2 of our five Hacktoberfest DEV Challenges starts today! Running through October 18, the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 2 gives you a full week to build.

This year's Hacktoberfest is all about building brand-new projects with open-source AI and open-weight models. Here's everything you need to know about Hacktoberfest 2026.

Missed Week 1: Touch Grass? No problem. Every challenge is a fresh start, so you're competing on the same footing as everyone else.

This week, we'll select one overall winner and a winner in each of our 17 partner categories. See all five challenges and current partner categories on the HF26 DEV Challenge Hub.

Let's get to it!

This week's theme: Side Hustle

Build something with open-weight models or open-source AI that someone would actually pay for.

That can mean running an open-weight model, building on an open-source agent harness or framework, running inference locally, or all three. Whatever you pick, the open pieces should be what makes your project work.

Think small, specific, and useful. The best builds here solve a real problem for a real person, whether that's a freelancer, a small business owner, a niche hobby community, or your friend who keeps complaining about the same tedious task. A few ideas to get you going:

An invoice and receipt sorter for freelancers that runs locally, so client data never leaves their laptop
A listing writer for Etsy or eBay sellers that turns a few product photos into a polished description
A menu translator for a local restaurant that handles their specific dishes better than a generic tool

In your post, tell us why open innovation matters for what you built. Does running your own model keep costs low enough that the business actually works? Keep your customers' data private? Let you fine-tune for a niche that a general-purpose API handles poorly? Avoid getting locked into someone else's pricing? Tell us where your open-based approach worked better than a closed one.

Bonus points if you land your first user. Get it in front of someone, let them use it, and tell us how it went. Did they pay? Would they? What did they ask for next?

Side Hustle Submission Template

Prize Categories

Alongside our overall winner, we have 17 prize categories for projects that use a specific partner's technology. You don't need to use any of these to win the overall prize, but if you've been curious about any of this tech, this is a great excuse to give one a try. Full descriptions are on the hub.

Featured categories:

Partner categories:

Pro Tip: Partner category winners come from a smaller pool of submissions, so your odds are meaningfully higher.

Note: One project can enter every category it genuinely uses, but you can only win once per challenge, and we'll aim to celebrate as many different builders as possible across the month.

Free credits: several partners are giving participants credits and promo codes, including Tinker, Render, and Backboard. Claim yours at hacktoberfest.com/my.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

Judging Criteria

This is DEV, so your write-up matters most.

Writing Quality (weighted most heavily): Is the post clear and engaging? Does it explain what you built, who it's for, and why open innovation matters?
Relevance to the Prompt and Theme: Is open-source AI or open-weight models at the core of the project? Is it something someone would actually pay for?
Creativity: Is it an original idea, or a fresh take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Does it work, and is it well built?
Use of Partner Technology (optional): If you're entering a partner category, does the project use that technology in a meaningful way?

Show your work. We'd love to see how you built it. Save your agent session with DevRelay and embed it in your post, or link to it. It's optional, but it helps the judges understand your process.

Prizes

Overall winner (1): $250 USD, a DEV++ membership, and an exclusive DEV badge
Featured category winners (6): $200 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each
Partner category winners (11): $100 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each

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

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template below. Tell us what you built and who would pay for it, show us a demo, and explain why open innovation matters for what you built. If you landed your first user, tell us about it!

Side Hustle Submission Template

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?

New to Hacktoberfest this year? Start with Everything You Need To Know About Hacktoberfest 2026.
Come hang out and ask questions in the MLH Discord.
The challenge page has resources from our partners to help you get started.

Important Dates

October 12: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 2 begins!
October 18: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
Week of October 19: Winners announced

Looking Ahead

Week 3 launches Monday, October 19 with a brand-new theme. Be sure to register so you don't miss the announcement.

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

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

Happy Hacktoberfest, and good luck!

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Winners!

Jem — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 19:32:27 +0000

We are so excited to announce the winners of the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend, the first of five challenges kicking off this year's Hacktoberfest!

This was our most participated-in challenge to date, nearly tripling our previous record for submissions. We asked you to build something with open-source AI at its core for one real person in your life, and you showed up for your parents, grandparents, siblings, classmates, roommates, and friends. Many of you told us how the person you built for reacted, and those stories made judging both a joy and a challenge.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Your projects show exactly why open models matter: private data stays at home, tools run without a credit card, and builders get to shape AI around the people they care about.

Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

ADK BBX

Oct 4

Phone calls are the boss fight of living in Japan. 🗼

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

13 min read

Featured Prize Category Winners

Best Use of Arduino

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Abhinav krishna N

Oct 5

Project JARVIS: The Offline AI Lab Assistant

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

10 min read

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Alex Georgiev

Oct 2

The BMW manual was off-limits, so I built my friend something better

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

10 min read

Best Use of Gemma

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Uptime Architect

Oct 4

Gemma 4 reads my parent's mail at home: 39 test letters, 9 of them real, and one calm wrong answer I engineered out

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma

11 min read

Best Use of Render

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Vicente G. Reyes

Oct 3

Tala: Free Audio-to-Text for My Designer Friend (No Signup, No Credit Card)

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

7 min read

Best Use of TabPFN

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Robert Moore

Oct 4

My mate wants a sub-5 70.3. Before recommending one, I made an open model predict 79 of my old race legs.

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

10 min read

Best Use of Tinker

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Muaaz Shaikh

Oct 4

Rakshak: I built my parents a scam-checker that never leaves the house

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

9 min read

Prize Category Winners

Best Use of Backboard

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Yash Kumar

Oct 2

Kharcha: a 4B model that reads Indian bank SMS so the money stays on your laptop

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

7 min read

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Rahul Kumar

Oct 5

Padh Ke Batao: an AI that reads my grandfather's documents to him, on a laptop with no GPU

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

7 min read

Best Use of Entire

Abdul Wasih

Oct 5

Viva: a mock interview that knows which parts of your project an AI wrote

#showdev #devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

4 min read

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Dosunmu Hassan

Oct 4

I built a panic button that doesn't tell me anything

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

9 min read

Best Use of Mastra

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Bipul Chamoli

Oct 2

Prep Buddy: an AI interview coach for my classmate that runs on his laptop with the Wi-Fi off

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

8 min read

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Elev 💥

Oct 4

I turned my sister in law's voice notes into a cookbook that answers in her voice

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource

8 min read

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Arqam Waheed

Oct 5

"If it's not in front of me, it's gone": I fine-tuned a 4B model for my friend with ADHD

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

12 min read

Best Use of SerpApi

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Muhammad Murtuza Hussain

Oct 2

Pīzhù 批注: a writing tutor that never rewrites your essay, built for my friend Joy (Gemma 4)

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest

10 min read

Best Use of Temporal

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Prateek Rai

Oct 3

PaidYet: for the friend who says “kal bhej dunga”

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource

9 min read

Best Use of Tiger Data

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Priyanshu Jha

Oct 5

My friend runs her supplements shop from WhatsApp voice notes, so I built her a shop helper

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

7 min read

Prizes

Our overall winner will receive:

$250 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV badge

Our featured prize category winners will each receive:

$200 USD
Exclusive DEV badge

Our prize category winners will each receive:

$100 USD
Exclusive DEV badge

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

A huge thank you to our partners, Render, Prior Labs, Thinking Machines, Arduino, DigitalOcean, Google, Backboard, ElevenLabs, Entire, GitHub, Mastra, MongoDB, SerpApi, Sentry, Temporal, and Tiger Data, for making these prizes possible!

What's Next?

Hacktoberfest is just getting started! We're launching a new challenge every week this month. Each challenge is a fresh start, so it's not too late to jump in. Week 1 is happening now:

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 5

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass! $2,450 in Prizes Across 17 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #softwaredevelopment

263

7 min read

Week 2 launches Monday, October 12, with a brand-new theme. Register for the upcoming challenges to be notified as details drop:

The Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 2 runs October 12 to October 18. This week's theme is Side Hustle: build something with open-weight models or open-source AI that someone would actually pay for. $2,550 in prizes across 18 winners. This year's Hacktoberfest is all about building brand-new projects with open-source AI and open-weight models. Every week brings a new theme, and every challenge is a fresh start, so you're competing on the same footing as everyone else.

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

Happy Hacktoberfest 💜

Congrats to Our First MLH x DEV Writing Challenge Winner!

Jem — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:56:35 +0000

We just wrapped the very first month of the MLH x DEV Writing Challenge, our new way of celebrating MLH hackers who take the time to document what they built. We loved reading through the submissions, and we're excited to kick things off by shining a spotlight on our favorite one.

Your hackathon may end after the weekend, but as this month's pick proves, your project story is just getting started.

Let's get to it!

🎉 Congratulations To…

This Month's Winner

Pritam Patra

Sep 22

OmniML: We Built an AutoML System That Refuses to Be a Black Box

#mlhacks #devchallenge #hackathon #ai

7 min read

@pritam_patra_429a25dedae6 built OmniML, a tool that helps build AI models and explains what's happening under the hood. Instead of a black box that spits out a finished model, OmniML checks in with you along the way, letting you weigh in on how the model is built, what data it's learning from, and how it's trained. It even explains its own decisions in plain terms and flags whether the result is fair and compliant, so you're never left guessing why it made the choices it did.

Prize

This month's winner will receive:

$100 USD

Just got back from a hackathon?

Don't let your project story end there. Publish your own submission using the official submission template for a chance to be featured next month.

What's Next?

Hacktoberfest is in full-swing and we're running a new challenge every week, each with a new theme. There's still time to enter this week's challenge:

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 5

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass! $2,450 in Prizes Across 17 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #softwaredevelopment

257

7 min read

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

See you next time!

What was your win this week??

Jess Lee — Fri, 09 Oct 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
Keeping a houseplant alive for another week 🪴

Happy Friday!

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass! $2,450 in Prizes Across 17 Winners.

Jem — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:03:31 +0000

Winners Announced!

Clever projects using AI to force offline breaks

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 16

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass Winners!

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest

4 min read

Week 1 of our five Hacktoberfest DEV Challenges starts today! Running through October 11, the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 1 gives you a full week to build.

This year's Hacktoberfest is all about building brand-new projects with open-source AI and open-weight models. Here's everything you need to know about Hacktoberfest 2026.

Missed the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge? No problem. Every challenge is a fresh start, so you're competing on the same footing as everyone else.

This week, we'll select one overall winner and a winner in each of our 16 partner categories. See all five challenges and every partner category on the HF26 DEV Challenge Hub.

Let's get to it!

This week's theme: Touch Grass

Build something with open-weight models or open-source AI that gets people off the screen and into the world.

Hiking, gardening, birding, run clubs, fall foliage: if it gets someone outside, it counts. The best builds here should make the screen the shortest part of the experience. A few ideas to get you going:

A bird call identifier that works on the trail with no signal
A garden planner that tells you what to plant this week based on your local frost dates
A run club route builder that finds the best fall foliage near you

In your post, tell us why open innovation matters for what you built. Does it run on a phone in the backcountry with no internet? Keep someone's location data off a server they don't control? Let you fine-tune, swap models, or change how your agent behaves? Cost nothing to run? Tell us where your open-based approach worked better than a closed one.

Bonus points if you take it outside, use it, and tell us how it went.

Touch Grass Submission Template

Prize Categories

Alongside our overall winner, we have 16 prize categories for projects that use a specific partner's technology. You don't need to use any of these to win the overall prize, but if you've been curious about any of this tech, this is a great excuse to give one a try. Full descriptions are on the hub.

Featured categories:

Partner categories:

Pro Tip: Partner category winners come from a smaller pool of submissions, so your odds are meaningfully higher.

Note: One project can enter every category it genuinely uses, but you can only win once per challenge, and we'll aim to celebrate as many different builders as possible across the month.

Free credits: several partners are giving participants credits and promo codes, including Tinker, Render, Backboard, and ElevenLabs. Claim yours at hacktoberfest.com/my.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

Judging Criteria

This is DEV, so your write-up matters most.

Writing Quality (weighted most heavily): Is the post clear and engaging? Does it explain what you built, who it's for, and why open innovation matters?
Relevance to the Prompt and Theme: Is open-source AI or open-weight models at the core of the project? Does it get people off the screen and into the world?
Creativity: Is it an original idea, or a fresh take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Does it work, and is it well built?
Use of Partner Technology (optional): If you're entering a partner category, does the project use that technology in a meaningful way?

Show your work. We'd love to see how you built it. Save your agent session with DevRelay and embed it in your post, or link to it. It's optional, but it helps the judges understand your process.

Prizes

Overall winner (1): $250 USD, a DEV++ membership, and an exclusive DEV badge
Featured category winners (6): $200 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each
Partner category winners (10): $100 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each

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

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template below. Tell us what you built and how it gets people outside, show us a demo, and explain why open innovation matters for what you built.

Touch Grass Submission Template

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?

New to Hacktoberfest this year? Start with Everything You Need To Know About Hacktoberfest 2026.
Come hang out and ask questions in the MLH Discord.
The challenge page has resources from our partners to help you get started.

Important Dates

October 5: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 1 begins!
October 11: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
Week of October 12: Winners announced

Week 2 launches Monday, October 12 with a brand-new theme. Follow #hf26challenge so you don't miss the reveal.

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

Happy Hacktoberfest, and good luck!

What was your win this week?

Jess Lee — Fri, 02 Oct 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
Finally beating that level you've been stuck on for weeks 🎮

Happy Friday!

Join the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend! $2,450 in Prizes Across 17 Winners. Submissions Due October 5 at 6:59 AM UTC.

Jem — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 02:02:58 +0000

Winners Announced!

Record-breaking participation with open-source AI

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 9

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Winners!

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

4 min read

Hacktoberfest is here, and so is the first of our five Hacktoberfest DEV Challenges: a Weekend Challenge sized to fit into your weekend. We've set the timing so that wherever you are in the world, you'll have most of your Saturday and Sunday to build.

This year's Hacktoberfest is not about open source pull requests. There's no PR count to hit and no repos to hunt for. Instead, you build a brand-new project with open-source AI at its core, and write about it on DEV. Here's everything you need to know about Hacktoberfest 2026.

We'll select one overall winner and a winner in each of our 16 partner categories. See all five challenges and every partner category on the HF26 DEV Challenge Hub.

Let's get to it!

Our Prompt: Build for a Friend

Build something with open-source AI at its core that solves a real problem for a friend or someone you love.

Pick one real person and build something for them. It doesn't have to be big. It has to matter to them. A few ideas to get you going:

A meal planner that knows your roommate's allergies
A patient practice partner for a friend learning a new language
A tool that turns your grandpa's voice memos into a family recipe book

In your post, tell us why open innovation matters for what you built. Does it run on a laptop with no internet? Keep someone's data off a server they don't control? Let you fine-tune, swap models, or change how your agent behaves? Cost nothing to run? Tell us where your open-based approach worked better than a closed one.

Bonus points if you actually hand it over and tell us what they said.

Prize Categories

Featured categories:

Partner categories:

Pro Tip: Partner category winners come from a smaller pool of submissions, so your odds are meaningfully higher.

Note: One project can enter every category it genuinely uses, but you can win once per challenge, and we'll aim to celebrate as many different builders as possible across the month.

Free credits: several partners are giving participants credits and promo codes, including Tinker, Render, Backboard, and ElevenLabs. Claim yours at hacktoberfest.com/my.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

Judging Criteria

This is DEV, so your write-up matters most.

Writing Quality (weighted most heavily): Is the post clear and engaging? Does it explain what you built, who it's for, and why open innovation matters?
Relevance to the Prompt and Theme: Is open-source AI at the core of the project? Does it fit this challenge's theme?
Creativity: Is it an original idea, or a fresh take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Does it work, and is it well built?
Use of Partner Technology (optional): If you're entering a partner category, does the project use that technology in a meaningful way?

Show your work. We'd love to see how you built it. Save your agent session with DevRelay and embed it in your post, or link to it. It's optional, but it helps the judges understand your process.

Prizes

Overall winner (1): $250 USD, a DEV++ membership, and an exclusive DEV badge
Featured category winners (6): $200 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each
Partner category winners (10): $100 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each

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

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template below. Tell us what you built and who it's for, show us a demo, and explain why open innovation matters for what you built.

Submission Template

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?

New to Hacktoberfest this year? Start with Everything You Need To Know About Hacktoberfest 2026.
Come hang out and ask questions in the MLH Discord.
The challenge page has resources from our partners to help you get started.

Important Dates

Launch: October 2, 2026, 2:00 AM UTC
Submissions due: October 5, 2026, 6:59 AM UTC
Winners announced: week of October 5

Timezone	Launch	Submissions Due
PDT	Thu Oct 1, 7:00 PM	Sun Oct 4, 11:59 PM
EDT	Thu Oct 1, 10:00 PM	Mon Oct 5, 2:59 AM
GMT	Fri Oct 2, 2:00 AM	Mon Oct 5, 6:59 AM
CEST	Fri Oct 2, 4:00 AM	Mon Oct 5, 8:59 AM
IST	Fri Oct 2, 7:30 AM	Mon Oct 5, 12:29 PM
JST	Fri Oct 2, 11:00 AM	Mon Oct 5, 3:59 PM
AEST	Fri Oct 2, 12:00 PM	Mon Oct 5, 4:59 PM

Then a new challenge launches every Monday in October. Follow #hf26challenge so you don't miss a theme reveal.

Happy Hacktoberfest, and good luck!

Congrats to the DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition Winners!

Jem — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:44:54 +0000

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

DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition Submission 💜

Asuran

Sep 6

A charity does not close because its overhead was too high. I checked 328,186 tax returns.

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge

9 min read

@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

DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition Submission 💜

Emma Sofia

Sep 5

We Throw Away 1.3 Billion Tons of Food While Millions Starve. I Built FoodBridge with Snowflake to Stop It

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #snowflake #webdev

6 min read

@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

DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition Submission 💜

Sarvar Nadaf

Sep 7

ReachAloud: I built a multilingual voice tool that reads emergency alerts aloud for people who can't read the screen

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #a11y #elevenlabs

5 min read

@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

DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition Submission 💜

ujja

Sep 5

I built PadForward because sometimes you just need a pad

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #gemini #solana

11 min read

@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

DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition Submission 💜

Yash Kumar Saini

Sep 6

The receipt should come from the person who received it

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #ai #rust

6 min read

@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.

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 1

Hacktoberfest 2026 DEV Challenges: Five Challenges, One Prompt, a New Theme Every Week

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #opensource

6 min read

We're kicking the month off with the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge, launching later tonight. Register now so you don't miss the announcement:

The 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.

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

We also have two other challenges happening right now:

Open-ended scope for custom model testing

Jem for The DEV Team

Sep 23

Join the Kaggle Benchmarking Challenge: $2,500 in Prizes for FIVE Winners!

#devchallenge #machinelearning #ai #kagglechallenge

204

4 min read

Jem for The DEV Team

Sep 18

Join the Sanity Challenge: $2,500 in prizes for FIVE winners!

#sanitychallenge #devchallenge #agents #webdev

268

8 min read

You can always find everything running at the moment on our challenges page.

Thanks again to everyone who built something generous with us 💜

DEV Community: The DEV Team

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass Winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Featured Category Winners

Best Use of Render

Best Use of TabPFN

Best Use of Tinker

Best Use of Arduino

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Best Use of Gemma

Partner Category Winners

Best Use of Backboard

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Best Use of Entire

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Best Use of Mastra

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Best Use of SerpApi

Best Use of Temporal

Best Use of Tiger Data

Prizes

What's Next?

What was your win this week?!

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Side Hustle! $2,550 in Prizes Across 18 Winners.

This week's theme: Side Hustle

Prize Categories

Judging Criteria

Prizes

How To Participate

Need Help?

Important Dates

Looking Ahead

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Featured Prize Category Winners

Best Use of Arduino

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Best Use of Gemma

Best Use of Render

Best Use of TabPFN

Best Use of Tinker

Prize Category Winners

Best Use of Backboard

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Best Use of Entire

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Best Use of Mastra

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Best Use of SerpApi

Best Use of Temporal

Best Use of Tiger Data

Prizes

What's Next?

Congrats to Our First MLH x DEV Writing Challenge Winner!

🎉 Congratulations To…

This Month's Winner

Prize

Just got back from a hackathon?

What's Next?

What was your win this week??

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass! $2,450 in Prizes Across 17 Winners.

This week's theme: Touch Grass

Prize Categories

Judging Criteria

Prizes

How To Participate

Need Help?

Important Dates

What was your win this week?

Join the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend! $2,450 in Prizes Across 17 Winners. Submissions Due October 5 at 6:59 AM UTC.

Our Prompt: Build for a Friend

Prize Categories

Judging Criteria

Prizes