DEV Community: Jess Lee

What was your win this week?

Jess Lee — Fri, 30 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
Remembering to drink your water every day 💧

Happy Friday!

Your DEV posts have a beautiful new share card ✨

Jess Lee — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:44:29 +0000

The image that shows up when you share a DEV post just got a brand-new look!

I got to work on forem/forem#24071 last week and I'm so excited to see it live in production:

Redesign generated social images as quote cards that work on X and LinkedIn #24071

jessleenyc posted on Oct 22, 2026

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[x] Bug Fix
[x] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

Articles without a cover image get a generated share image (articles.social_image). In the last 30 days on DEV, that was 73% of published posts. The old card had two problems:

It repeated the title. X, LinkedIn and Slack already show the title as text next to the image.
X's title label covered the byline. X overlays the post title in a dark label inset at the bottom-left of link cards, right on top of the author's name and date.

New design: the card quotes the opening of the post inside a browser-window frame over a soft mesh gradient. A byline row shows the avatar, name, date and reading time, and the community's horizontal header logo (Settings::General.resized_logo, falling back to logo_png) sits in the window's title bar.

One image for every platform: the card is sized so its top and bottom margins both equal X's 80px keep-clear zone.

X's title label covers only the gradient.
The card is vertically centered where nothing is overlaid (LinkedIn, Slack, iMessage, …).
A spec enforces both. No schema change and no view change.

Quote (Images::SocialImageQuote):

Uses top-level opening paragraphs. Skips paragraphs that are entirely italic (challenge "This is a submission for…" intros), paragraphs that repeat the title, and headings, code, images and blockquotes. Blockquotes usually quote someone else, and the card attributes the text to the author.
Joins short paragraphs until there are at least 80 characters, then cuts at the last sentence end within 180 characters, or at a word with "…".
Falls back to the title when the post has no usable paragraph.

Colors:

The author's brand color (brand_color1, or the organization's bg_color_hex) becomes an analogous palette.
Otherwise one of four Forem gradient palettes is chosen from the article ID, so cards vary. Only about 6% of authors with coverless posts set a brand color.

Regeneration: in addition to title, publish date and author (#24063), Article#generate_social_image now also fires when:

the reading time changes,
a body edit changes the quote. Old and new quotes are compared, so edits further down the post don't re-render.

Bug fixes along the way

Text escaping: user text is now rendered with label:/caption: and escaped, never with -draw text.
- Through MiniMagick, -draw runs in mogrify, which takes the escapes literally. A name like @jess or 50% showed \@jess / 50\% on today's cards.
- In caption:/label:, an unescaped leading @ makes ImageMagick read a file into the image. This was verified locally, and a spec covers it.
Stylized Unicode names: names such as 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐳𝐲 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥 rendered blank (Noto Sans has no math-alphanumeric glyphs). They're now NFKC-normalized. Emoji are dropped from the name and quote for the same reason.
Fonts: font/fill are set before each draw. Previously they came after the draw calls, so the date had no font set.
Wrapping uses real glyph widths (caption: plus a shrink-to-fit loop) instead of character-count heuristics.

Performance

About 1–2s per article on my machine.
Intermediate steps use uncompressed MIFF, so PNG is encoded once. Per-step PNG encoding was the bottleneck.
The gradient is drawn at 400×209 and scaled up.
Output is 8-bit RGB PNG, about 100KB.
No external services or AI are involved; it's ImageMagick only.

Production runs ImageMagick 6 (Debian bullseye), so the generator sticks to IM6-compatible operations: xc:, simple draws, blur, resize, caption:/label:, Over compositing, and the existing rounded_mask.png for avatars.

Related Tickets & Documents

Builds on forem/forem#24063 (regenerates the image when an article's author changes), which is merged into this branch. Its author-change trigger is kept.

QA Instructions, Screenshots, Recordings

Publish a post without a cover image and let Images::SocialImageWorker run. Check article.social_image.
Paste the post URL into X's composer and into LinkedIn's post preview. The quote and byline should be fully visible on both, with X's title label over the gradient only.
Edit the first paragraph → the image regenerates. Edit only a later paragraph (same reading time) → no regeneration.

Before / after

Simulated X and LinkedIn link-card previews. Each post is rendered with today's generator and with this PR's generator. The X frame follows X's current layout (the title label inset at the bottom-left) and was checked against a real X post. The long-title example also shows a bug in today's card: long titles run off the right edge.

The design was reviewed an

d signed off by @jessleenyc.

Known limitation (pre-existing): Noto Sans has no CJK glyphs, so CJK text still renders as boxes, as it did in the old title-based card.

Added/updated tests?

[x] Yes
- Images::SocialImageQuote: paragraph selection, skip rules, sentence/word cuts, Unicode cleanup, title fallback.
- Images::GenerateSocialImageMagickally: stored image for Article/User/Organization; X keep-clear and vertical centering; a real ImageMagick render at 1200×627; the @file escaping regression; palette, accent, name and meta helpers; read_files and logo caching.
- Article#generate_social_image: quote-change, later-edit and reading-time triggers.

Local test status: the DB-free SocialImageQuote examples pass, and real renders were checked locally on ImageMagick 7. The DB-backed specs rely on CI, because the current schema needs pgvector, which my local Postgres lacks. CI also exercises the real-render spec on ImageMagick 6.

[optional] Are there any post deployment tasks we need to perform?

None. No migration, and no backfill: existing images update when a post's title, date, author, reading time or opening changes.

View on GitHub

Meet the new card

Every post now gets a quote card. It pulls the opening of your post and sets it inside a little browser-window frame over a gradient. Below that sits your profile pic, name, publish date, and reading time.

Most places that unfurl a link already show its title, so I wanted to remove the redundancy. It shows the first lines of your post instead. That's where your voice is, and now it's the first thing people see when your post is shared!

Color comes from your profile's brand color if you've set one. If not, the card uses one of our four palettes, so a page full of shared posts feels varied and bright.

One image, everywhere

There's one image, and it unfurls anywhere your link gets shared. It's sized with roomy top and bottom margins, so even when a platform (ahem, X) lays its own label over the image, your name and details stay clear.

A few extra touches

While we were in there, we polished a few more things:

Names with @ or % display cleanly, without stray backslashes.
Names in stylized Unicode (𝓯𝓪𝓷𝓬𝔂 𝓽𝓮𝔁𝓽 like this) render properly.
The image refreshes when your reading time or opening quote changes, so it stays current after you edit.

Thank you to Ben for the review and merge!

A little history

Back in 2018, Ben wrote about how DEV generated social images in the first place:

Ben Halpern

Feb 26 '18

How dev.to dynamically generates social images

#meta #ruby #webdev

3 min read

In August 2023, Ben moved generation in-house with ImageMagick (#19949). It was a great cost savings to host every post's card ourselves, on our own infrastructure, instead of handing it to a third-party service. Everything in this redesign builds on that foundation.

Go see yours

Share one of your posts (without a cover image) and take a look at your new card. Tag us (@thepracticaldev) or me (@jessleenyc) on X so I can admire it. If anything looks off, like a name that renders strangely or a quote that cuts off in a weird spot, let me know in the comments!

What was your win this week!?

Jess Lee — Fri, 23 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
Getting to inbox zero, even for five whole minutes 📬

Happy Friday!

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!

How I Feel about the Grace Hopper Celebration Getting Cancelled

Jess Lee — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:57:57 +0000

The Grace Hopper Celebration has been around since 1994, and for a lot of people, it's the event for women in tech. It's where students land their first internships, where people find mentors and peers who look like them, and where, for a few days, being a woman in a room full of technologists is the norm instead of the exception.

AnitaB.org has cancelled this year's Celebration, which was supposed to take place in Anaheim later this month. Their statement says registrations and sponsorships came in "significantly below" expectations, and the funds needed to put on the event just weren't there.

I was supposed to attend for the first time this year and host a panel on the evolution of nontraditional career paths into tech. I was really looking forward to that conversation.

A little over two years ago, I wrote about how I felt when Women Who Code shut down, and this news brings up a lot of the same feelings.

The sponsorship gap

Conferences like Grace Hopper run on company support, and that support shows up in two ways. The obvious one is sponsorship: booths, recruiting teams, and the dollars that make an event of this scale possible. The less obvious one is registrations. Between tickets, flights, and hotels, attending GHC adds up fast, and for a big chunk of attendees, it's their employer who has historically covered the cost. So when companies stop paying for their teams to attend, low registrations aren't a sign that people don't want to go. They're the same sponsorship gap, just showing up in a different line item.

When that support dries up on both fronts, even the most established event in the space can't happen.

When Women Who Code shut down, it felt like my fears of stagnancy and going backwards were being confirmed. I wish I could say things have turned around since then. Instead:

Company budgets for DEIB have continued to shrink, and "diversity" has become a word a lot of companies would rather not say out loud.
Sponsorship dollars for community events have dried up across the board.
The people these spaces serve are still tired. Being the only woman in the room hasn't gotten less exhausting just because it's gotten less fashionable to talk about.

Women Who Code and Grace Hopper were two of the biggest, most established institutions in this space. If the tech industry, which is by most measures still incredibly well-resourced, isn't investing in them, then smaller grassroots groups are in an even tougher spot.

What's next

One of my personal goals right now is to speak more, and news like this makes that feel more important than ever. If the big stages are disappearing, those of us who have a platform need to keep using it.

But you don't need a stage to make a difference. Look around at your team, your community, your classmates, and find the people who are undervalued and underrepresented. Mentor them, recommend them, amplify their work, and make sure they're heard in the rooms they're in. That kind of support doesn't need a sponsor.

Thanks for reading <3

Inaugural AI Engineer NYC Hackathon Kicks Off Conference Week With 50+ Projects

Jess Lee — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:56:49 +0000

Apartment hunters, accessibility tools and debugging agents top a 12-hour build day in Manhattan

By 9 a.m. Sunday, the room at 9th Avenue and 31st Street was already buzzing with excitement and anticipation. Laptops were open, coffee was poured, and the line for scallion pancake bacon egg and cheese wraps (catered by Win Son Bakery) snaked across the room. Twelve hours later, teams made from 150+ builders had their projects for science-fair demos at the inaugural AI Engineer NYC Hackathon in an unofficial kickoff for AI Engineer New York conference week.

Major League Hacking (MLH) presented the event with AI Engineer as co-host. It was free for anyone to join and bring their team, their idea, or just themselves and hunger to learn. Attendance at the hackathon exceeded capacity in the main 9th floor space, so an overflow room on the 6th floor was set up to accommodate the extra demand.

The crowd was not the usual hackathon mix of students. Many attendees build software for a living as engineers, founders, researchers and product people, and they chose to spend a Sunday building some more. If you haven’t been to a hackathon before, or in a while, the choice to spend more time “working” can feel strange. But nothing can replace the way it feels to get your hands on a keyboard and work through a problem side by side with other builders. At the AI Engineer NYC hackathon, this really came through. Conversations moved from "how does this API work" to "here's how we handle this in production." Teams that had met at the morning team-formation session were trading deployment tips and opinions on agent frameworks within an hour.

Dumplings and Demos

The Nom Wah lunch spread, a nod to the Chinatown dim sum institution, did more for networking than any icebreaker. Builders carried plates of dumplings back to their tables and kept talking, and newly formed teams sat down together for the first time without a screen in front of them. Mentors circulated all afternoon, and in the evening the happy hour gave a final burst of energy before the demo deadline.

There was plenty of laughter, some groaning at stubborn bugs, and the occasional cheer when a demo worked on the first try. Many people who arrived alone left with teammates, collaborators and a few new friends.

A Very New York Winner

First place overall went to Boroly, which takes on one of the city's most familiar headaches: finding an apartment. Boroly compares listings side by side and adds neighborhood context like local grocers, restaurants, and laundromats. It scrapes this local data and uses Google's Gemini to summarize what it finds, so renters can see what living on a block is actually like, not just the square footage or the number of bedrooms. (source)

Second place went to Claude Code Ripple, a tool for developers (a “Mod,” a new class of agentic plugins) who have changed one line of code and then watched something unrelated break. Ripple traces how a change spreads through a codebase, including renames, before it ships.

Resurface took third. It turns forgotten bookmarks into animated reels and uses those saved links to build a profile of a user's interests that AI agents can draw on. (source)

Partner Prizes Spark Creative Builds

Partner challenges gave teams more ways to win. Public Palate won Best Use of Nimble by combining restaurant inspection records with reviews, and the runner-up, Nibble, finds the cheapest grocery prices in your area. Explorin won Best Use of Gemini API with experience-based personalization of travel recommendations. RetailScope AI took Best Use of Snowflake with a tool for finding commercial real estate deals. Zig Actions Runner won Best Use of Tiger Data for a lightweight, local GitHub Actions runner. rezolution.si won Best Use of Sentry with an agent that investigates bug reports and generates fixes. MyVision, which helps visually impaired users detect nearby obstacles, won the Sentry raffle.

Setting the Tone for the Week

The hackathon was planned as a lead-in to the conference, because many of the coding agents, data pipelines and context-aware assistants that builders engaged with on Sunday leverage the same workflows and tools that speakers will cover over the next few days. Attendees who missed Sunday can find these builders around the conference all week. They are the ones who look tired but happy, and many of them now have a new project and a new team.

One Weekend: 3,000 Open-Source AI Projects

Jess Lee — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 19:43:45 +0000

Every October for the past twelve years, developers around the world have taken part in Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open-source software: code that anyone can use, inspect, and improve. For most of that history, the rules were simple: Contribute a set number of pull requests and earn a T-shirt. Thousands of people made their first contribution to open source because of Hacktoberfest.

This year, we changed the format. Hacktoberfest 2026 is focused on open-weight models and open-source artificial intelligence: models and tools that anyone can download, run and modify. Participants are learning how these systems work, building their own AI tooling, and adapting existing open models for new uses.

When we announced this year’s theme in August, we had hoped to support 300 in-person gatherings. There are now more than 500 Fests planned in over 60 countries, ranging from university hackathons to small groups of developers meeting at their local library or office. In the first week alone, participants in-person and online submitted more than 3,000 projects.

On Oct. 1, the first day of the event, students at COMSATS University in Abbottabad, Pakistan, gathered for a Hack Day. By evening, they had built a locally hosted hospital-management platform, a multimodal companion for visually impaired users, and a tool that helps newcomers make their first open-source contribution. The group photo they sent us afterward says more than any statistic I could share: a group of people who chose to spend their day learning to build something together.

For many people, AI is something experienced alone: typing into a chat window, using a tool built by someone else and governed by someone else's pricing and policies. What I'm seeing this month is a clear appetite for something different. People want to sit next to each other, run a model on their own machine, take it apart, and understand how it works.

That is why we built this year's Hacktoberfest around open innovation. Open source has always worked because nobody owns the tools. Anyone can look under the hood, and anyone can pull up a chair. We believe AI should work the same way: shaped by people building in public in India and Ireland, Peru and the Philippines, all over the world.

Hacktoberfest runs through Oct. 31. When it ends, I don’t expect its impact to be measured solely in code. It will show up in mentorships that started at a folding table, in local tech communities meeting for the first time, and in people who walked in unsure what an AI model was and walked out having built something with one.

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!

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!

Everything You Need To Know About Hacktoberfest 2026: AI Belongs to Everyone 🎃

Jess Lee — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:19:06 +0000

It's October 1st, which means Hacktoberfest 2026 is officially live! 🎉

This year looks a little different. Hacktoberfest is now powered by Major League Hacking (MLH) and DEV, presented by DigitalOcean, and it's built around one idea:

AI belongs to everyone.

For the entire month, people around the world are coming together, online and in person, to discover, learn about, and build with open-source AI. Maybe you'll finally figure out what an "open-weight model" actually is. Maybe you'll catch your first livestream, try an AI tool you can run and inspect yourself, or build something with a friend at a local Fest.

Maybe you'll write your first skills.md, build an open-source agent, or fine-tune a model. Wherever you're starting from, there's a place for you this month.

Totally new to "Open-Source AI"? Here's what you need to know:

You don't need to be a developer, or to have ever touched open source, to take part in Hacktoberfest. A few quick definitions to get you going:

Open source means the code is public. Anyone can look at how a project is made, learn from it, use it, and help improve it.
Open-weight models are AI models whose "weights" (the learned knowledge that makes the model work) are publicly released, so anyone can download, run, study, and adapt them, rather than only accessing them through a company's app. Open-weight is not the same as open source.
Open-source AI tools are the building blocks around those models (agents, frameworks, and utilities) that are shared openly for anyone to use and improve.

Why does this matter? When AI is open, more people get to understand it, access it, and shape how it's used. That's what "AI belongs to everyone" is all about, and Hacktoberfest is a month-long invitation to come see for yourself.

A quick note on what's changed

When DigitalOcean launched Hacktoberfest in 2014, the formula was simple: open four pull requests, earn a t-shirt. That idea helped bring a whole generation of people into open source. 💜

But AI tools now make low-effort pull requests trivial to generate, and open-source maintainers have been paying the price. So this year, pull requests and merge requests no longer count toward Hacktoberfest rewards. Instead, the focus is on learning and building together, and on open source as a philosophy of transparency and collective ownership, not a PR count.

You can read more about the thinking behind this change on the Hacktoberfest Mission page.

📒 Start your sticker book

Everything you do this month, in person or online, earns virtual stickers in your Hacktoberfest sticker book. Collect enough virtual stickers, and real ones show up in your mailbox:

Stickers collected	Reward
3	A physical Hacktoberfest sticker pack, mailed to you
10	A bonus holographic sticker added to your pack
17	You're a Hacktoberfest Completionist, with an automatic raffle entry for a Hacktoberfest t-shirt or an Arduino Uno Q board

You can earn stickers by attending a Fest, checking into livestreams, joining Global Hack Week, submitting to DEV Challenges, joining the MLH Discord, taking the pre- and post-event surveys, and more. If you use an AI coding assistant, you can also earn one by installing and logging in to DevRelay, a tool that connects DEV and MLH right inside your agent session. The full list is on the Hacktoberfest Activities page.

Start your sticker book

Once you sign in with a free MyMLH account to start your sticker book, connect your DEV account to earn your first sticker!

🏙️ Join a Fest near you

This year there are 300+ community-hosted, one-day Fests happening in 60+ countries around the world. We can't recommend going in person enough, especially if you're just getting started. There's nothing like learning alongside people who are figuring it out with you. Here's what you get when you show up:

Hacktoberfest 2026 t-shirts, stickers, and swag, available in person while supplies last.
An official participation certificate and an "Attend a Fest" virtual sticker for your sticker book.
Your people. Meet others in your community who are curious about open-source AI.
Hands-on building with real hardware. Select Hack Days have Arduinos on hand, so you can take an open-source AI project off the screen and into the physical world.

Fests come in two flavors:

Meetups: talks, workshops, panels, and time to connect with others. No project or team required, which makes them a great first step if you're new.
Hack Days: mini-hackathons where you build with open-weight models or open-source AI tools, demo at the end of the day, and compete for prizes. Come solo or bring a team.

Find a Fest

🌐 Join online

Global Hack Week: Hacktoberfest

Can't make it to a Fest? Global Hack Week: Hacktoberfest brings the energy online from Friday, October 9 (12:00 PM EDT) through Thursday, October 15 (1:00 PM EDT).

It's a free, week-long virtual hacker festival, and a welcoming place to learn at your own pace:

Daily livestreamed workshops, with recordings on YouTube if you can't catch them live
Challenges of all kinds, from social and design challenges to technical ones that earn you points
Mini-events and community hangouts in the MLH Discord

Global Hack Week counts toward your sticker book too: you can earn stickers for completing the registration challenges, checking into a livestream, and more.

DEV Challenges

We're running five challenges throughout Hacktoberfest, all with cash prizes, and each submission earns you a virtual sticker. They're a great excuse to try something new and share what you learned along the way.

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge

We're kicking things off with a short-form weekend challenge. The prompt drops in just a few hours, and you'll have the weekend to build and submit.

Timezone	Launch Time (Local)	Submissions Due (Local)
PDT	Thursday, Oct 1 at 7:00 PM	Sunday, Oct 4 at 11:59 PM
EDT	Thursday, Oct 1 at 10:00 PM	Monday, Oct 5 at 2:59 AM
GMT	Friday, Oct 2 at 2:00 AM	Monday, Oct 5 at 6:59 AM
CEST	Friday, Oct 2 at 4:00 AM	Monday, Oct 5 at 8:59 AM
IST	Friday, Oct 2 at 7:30 AM	Monday, Oct 5 at 12:29 PM
JST	Friday, Oct 2 at 11:00 AM	Monday, Oct 5 at 3:59 PM
AEST	Friday, Oct 2 at 12:00 PM	Monday, Oct 5 at 4:59 PM

Open-Source AI Challenges: Weeks 1–4

After the weekend, we're inviting you to explore and build with open-source AI every week. Each week has its own theme:

Round	Dates
Week 1	October 5–11
Week 2	October 12–18
Week 3	October 19–25
Week 4	October 26–31

Pro tip: Week 1 wraps up right as Global Hack Week gets going, so the workshops you catch at GHW are perfect fuel for your Week 2 submission. 😉

Follow the #hf26challenge tag to see what everyone's making, and register early for each challenge so you don't miss any announcements.

DevRelay

We just launched something cool.

If you build with an AI coding agent, DevRelay connects it to DEV and MLH. Your agent knows which challenge or hackathon you've entered, helps you build for it, and lets you submit without leaving your session.

It can also get you partner coupons from MLH while you build, and we're adding more partners over time, so you can often deploy for free. Install it and log in to earn a sticker for your sticker book. 🎃

Get DevRelay

💜 Thank you to our sponsors

Hacktoberfest 2026 is presented by DigitalOcean and made possible by our sponsors: Tiger Data, Snowflake, MongoDB, Gauge, Solana, Render, GitHub, Sentry, Backboard.io, IBM, ElevenLabs, Paper Compute, Entire, Prior Labs, Google Cloud, Gemma, Qualcomm, Arduino, Mastra, Temporal, TLDR, and Thinking Machines.

Questions?

Check out the Hacktoberfest FAQ or reach out to hacktoberfest@mlh.io. For questions about a specific Fest, use the "Contact Host" button on its event page.

However you show up this month, whether you're curious, brand new, or a seasoned open-source contributor, we're so glad you're here. AI belongs to everyone. Let's explore it together. 🎃

Happy Hacktoberfest!

Join Us Live: Hacktoberfest 2026 Launch with Exclusive Swag! 🎃🚀

Jess Lee — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:21:18 +0000

Hacktoberfest officially kicks off October 1st! To celebrate, we are hosting an official launch livestream right on the DEV homepage.

Tune in to hear what's in store this month, get ready for both in-person and online events, and score exclusive swag for livestream attendees.

🗓️ Launch Details

When: Oct 1 at 3:00 PM UTC / 11:00 AM EDT / 8:30PM IST.
Where: Right on the DEV homepage or MLH Twitch.
Bonus Perk: Stick around for the stream to claim a special bonus sticker reserved for everyone who joins.

🚀 Get Ahead Before We Go Live

Set up your My Hacktoberfest account now so you are ready to check in the moment we go live.

🛠️ Jump Into Hacktoberfest Challenges

The Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge launches Oct 2 at 2:00AM UTC and is the fastest way to jump in and start building.

If you don't have time this weekend, you can also check out all the other Hacktoberfest DEV Challenges happening throughout the month.

🎁 Earn Virtual Stickers, Get Real Stickers

Earning swag is simple! Sign in, show up, and start checking off the activities:

Set up your My Hacktoberfest account: It's free and takes just a minute. Sign in and add your address to receive your first two virtual stickers.
Complete a milestone: Install DevRelay, join a Fest, submit to a DEV challenge, check out a livestream, etc. The options are endless!.
Get a swag pack in the mail: Collect three virtual stickers by completing milestones and we'll mail you a real sticker pack.

Keep collecting to unlock even more swag!

See you on the stream tomorrow!!

What was your win this week!?

Jess Lee — Fri, 25 Sep 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
Cooking a meal without checking the recipe once 👩‍🍳

Happy Friday!