My Hacktoberfest 2026 Recap: Five Gemma Apps, 21 Stickers and Completionist++

#hacktoberfest #opensource #gemma #angular

I'm a past participant of Hacktoberfest, completing quite a few challenges. I was bummed at first to find out that PRs were no longer accepted but that feeling faded as I started having fun with AI. This month taught me that you can enjoy building apps with AI and the DEV Hacktoberfest challenges made it exciting!

I had ankle surgery last month so I participated 100% online. It was nice to have a challenge and something to focus on while I recover.

By Halloween I had shipped five open-source apps, collected 21 stickers, and earned Completionist++.

The five apps

Week	App	What it does	Links
Weekend Challenge	🥪 Let's Not Be Hangry	Meal nudges for my boyfriend, who forgets to eat	Live · Post
Week 1	🥾 Off-Grid Trails	A trail finder that still works when the bars are gone	Live · Post
Week 2	🌊 Ripple	One blog post, every social platform, written by Gemma	Live · Post
Week 3	🦥 Bookmark Buddy	Gemma tidies your messy bookmarks (my 722 took about 15 minutes)	Live · Post
Week 4	🕯️ Halls of Horror	Gemma builds a walk-through haunted house	Live · Post

Plus Global Hack Week: Game Day Glance (my Cursor challenge), a few Grok bot challenges, and 14 GHW points. Full recap here: My Global Hack Week Recap

How the month went

Oct 1–4: signed up, did the starter stickers, and shipped Let's Not Be Hangry for the Weekend Challenge.
Oct 5–15: Global Hack Week, plus Off-Grid Trails for Week 1.
Oct 12–16: Lighter week / mid-month break.
Oct 13: hit Completionist (15 stickers).
Oct 16: decided to go for Completionist++.
Oct 17: Ripple.
Oct 25: Bookmark Buddy, including a Chrome/Edge extension.
Oct 31: the closing ceremony, the post-event survey, and Halls of Horror. Completionist++ on Halloween. 🎃

The stack I kept coming back to

Angular 22: zoneless, signals, standalone components and the new control flow. (I also rebuilt my portfolio from Angular 12 to 22 at the start of the month: the writeup.)
Gemma, running in the browser with WebLLM and WebGPU: private, offline after the first download, and free.
Render static sites, with no backend at all.

What I learned building with a small open model

Gemma writes the words, the app owns everything else. Gemma never touched the UI, the sound, or the data. It only wrote text.
One small step at a time. A 2B model loses the thread on big asks. One room, one post, one batch of bookmarks at a time works far better.
Give it a simple format, then read it forgivingly. Short labeled lines (like ROOM / SEE / HEAR) that the app can parse even when the model adds bold or numbers.
Let code do what code is good at. In Bookmark Buddy, keyword pre-sorting fixed recipes landing in three different folders before Gemma ever saw them.
Build the guardrails in. Content rules in every prompt, and warnings, captions and reduced motion in the UI.

What surprised me

I was surprised how well Claude built these apps, and how good Gemma is for an open-source model. I wasn't aware of any open-source models before Hacktoberfest so I did learn a lot! I'm looking forward to using more open-source models in future projects.

What's next: Vibe Check

All five apps were built fast, with AI as my pair programmer. Next I'm going back through each one to find the accessibility gaps only a human catches, and fixing them in public. That's Vibe Check, a new series starting in November.

Accessibility is important and we need to keep the human in the loop. I've learned a lot about physical accessibility while not being able to walk for a month. Digital accessibility is just as important.

Thanks to DEV, Major League Hacking, DigitalOcean, and the Gemma and WebLLM teams for a great October.

Happy Hacking!!! ✨