DoraHacks

0. More Than Just Winning Prizes
So you're ready to sign up for your first hackathon. Maybe you're a college student looking to build something cool over a weekend, or a solo developer hoping to explore new tech and meet like-minded people. Either way, welcome! You're about to experience one of the best ways to learn, build, and grow as a builder.
But here's something most beginners don't realize: the hackers who get the most out of hackathons aren't always the ones who win. Prizes are nice, but the skills, portfolio projects, and connections you gain last much longer.
This guide will help you avoid common beginner mistakes and set you up to thrive, whether you take home a prize or not.

1. Choose Your First Hackathons and Platforms Wisely
Not all hackathons are created equal. As a beginner, start with hackathons hosted by established companies, tech giants like Google and AWS in AI, or companies like Circle and Binance in crypto. These events tend to have clear rules, responsive organizers, and meaningful feedback from judges.
Trusted platforms help you filter signals from noise. DoraHacks(dorahacks.io) is one of the largest and most trusted hackathon platforms, hosting ongoing events in collaboration with leading companies and communities across AI, blockchain, and frontier tech. With hundreds of thousands of past projects archived on the platform, you can research hackathons before joining and learn from previous winners (something we'll cover more later). The platform's reputation means a baseline level of quality for both organizers and participants.
Be cautious with unfamiliar platforms or events with vague organizer information - your time is valuable, so spend it on hackathons that respect that.

2. Read the Rules Like Your Submission Depends on It (Because It Does)
This sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many submissions get disqualified because the hackers didn't follow the rules. Before you write a single line of code or description, read the hackathon rules carefully and understand what's actually required.
Pay attention to eligibility requirements; Check submission requirements like demo videos, GitHub repos, or any documentation; Note any restrictions; And understand the judging criteria.
Rules aren't red tapes. They're the contract between you and the organizers. Respecting them shows professionalism and ensures your hard work actually gets judged fairly.

3. Don't Be a Prize Farmer
It's tempting to submit the same project to every hackathon you can find, hoping something sticks. Resist this urge. Organizers and judges can spot a recycled, off-topic submission immediately, and it rarely ends well.
Most hackathons have a theme or focus for a reason. Even if there's an "open track," judges still evaluate how well your project aligns with the hackathon's goals. A blockchain hackathon isn't the right place for your unrelated matching app, no matter how polished it is.
Instead of spreading yourself thin across ten irrelevant hackathons, focus on a few that genuinely match your interests and skills. You'll produce better work and make a stronger impression on judges and sponsors who care about the same problems you do.
4. Communicate Early and Often
Many beginners treat hackathons like exams - head down, no talking, figure it out yourself. This is a mistake. Good hackathons have organizers, mentors, and community channels specifically to help you succeed. Use them.
If something in the rules is unclear, ask for clarification before you build the wrong thing. If you're stuck on a technical problem, reach out to mentors or post in the community Discord. If you're unsure whether your idea fits the theme, check with organizers early rather than finding out during judging. Like on DoraHacks(dorahacks.io), you can always message the organizers directly.
Don't suffer in silence when help is available.

5. Learn From Other Hackers
One of the most underrated benefits of hackathons is the chance to learn from other participants. You're surrounded by people solving similar problems with different approaches, skill levels, and perspectives.
Studying past submissions is one of the fastest ways to improve. On DoraHacks(dorahacks.io), you can browse numerous projects from previous hackathons (like this one: https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/awsvibecoding/winner), filter by category, and see exactly what winning teams submitted. Look at their demo videos, read their page, and examine how they presented their ideas. Pay attention to what made top projects stand out: clear problem statements, polished demos, strong alignment with hackathon themes. Equally valuable is noticing what weaker submissions lacked, so you can avoid the same mistakes.

During the hackathon itself, engage with other participants. Share what you're working on, ask what others are building, and don't be afraid to give and receive feedback. The hacker community is generally supportive, and today's fellow participant might be tomorrow's collaborator or co-founder.
6. Nail Your Submission Presentation
A great project with a terrible presentation often loses to a decent project with a great presentation. Judges have limited time and dozens of submissions to review. Make their job easy.
Your written description matters. Use clear language, structure your explanation logically, and don't assume judges have context you haven't provided. Screenshots, diagrams, and links to working demos all strengthen your submission.
Your demo video should be concise and clear. Explain the problem you're solving, show how your solution works, and highlight what makes it unique - all in one to three minutes unless the rules specify otherwise.

Think of your submission as a pitch. You're not just showing what you built - you're convincing judges why it matters.
7. Manage Your Time Wisely
Hackathons have deadlines, and they arrive faster than you expect. Poor time management is one of the most common reasons promising projects end up as incomplete submissions.
Reserve time at the end for your submission materials. Recording a demo video, writing documentation, and packaging everything properly takes longer than you think. Don't leave it for the last hour.
If you're working with a team, coordinate clearly on who's doing what. Parallel work is efficient, but only if everyone knows their responsibilities.
8. Embrace the Outcome and Keep Building
Hackathons are competitions, and competitions have winners and losers. You might pour your heart into a project and walk away with nothing. It stings, but it's completely normal.
What separates successful hackers from frustrated ones is how they respond. If you don't win, ask yourself what you learned. If your idea makes sense and you keep building seriously, opportunities will find you. Many successful projects didn't win their first hackathon but improved through iteration and eventually found their moment.

The hackathon ends, but your work doesn't have to. If you built something promising, keep developing it. Hackathon projects make excellent portfolio pieces, and continued progress shows potential employers or investors that you're serious.
Countless amazing projects sparked in hackathons only to disappear forever. The excitement fades, life gets busy, and that brilliant idea never sees another commit. Don't let yours be one of them.
Celebrate your wins, learn from your losses, and keep showing up. Consistency beats luck in the long run.
Conclusion: Play the Long Game
Your first hackathon is just the beginning. You'll make mistakes, learn lessons, and probably wish you'd done some things differently. That's fine - everyone starts somewhere.
The hackers who get the most out of hackathons treat each one as a step in a longer journey. They build skills, expand their network, and develop a track record of showing up and shipping. Over time, the wins come, not because they got lucky, but because they got better.
So find a hackathon that excites you on DoraHacks(dorahacks.io), read the rules, chat with organizers, learn from others, and keep building. The rest takes care of itself.
Happy hacking!

About DoraHacks
DoraHacks(dorahacks.io) is the leading global hackathon community and open source developer incentive platform. DoraHacks provides toolkits for anyone to organize hackathons and fund early-stage ecosystem startups.
DoraHacks creates a global hacker movement in Web3, AI, Quantum Computing and Space Tech. So far, more than 30,000 startup teams from the DoraHacks community have received over $300M in funding, and a large number of open source communities, companies and tech ecosystems are actively using DoraHacks together with its BUIDL AI capabilities for organizing hackathons and funding open source initiatives.
Website: https://dorahacks.io/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DoraHacksDiscord: https://discord.gg/gKT5DsWwQ5Telegram: https://t.me/dorahacksofficialBinance Live: https://www.generallink.top/en/live/u/24985985Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DoraHacksGlobal

Organizing a hackathon might look straightforward from the outside: set up a website/page, announce some prizes, and wait for submissions to roll in. In reality, a successful hackathon is the result of dozens of decisions made well before the event begins. You’ll see the differences between well/poorly-prepared hackathons on platforms like DoraHacks (https://dorahacks.io) clearly.
Poor preparation leads to predictable problems. Vague rules create disputes; Unclear target audiences result in failed marketing; Underestimating resource needs leaves you scrambling for sponsors before launch or burning out your team with unsustainable workloads…these issues are far easier to prevent than to fix mid-event.
Good preparation, on the other hand, creates a foundation that makes everything else smoother. Think of this phase as building the blueprint before construction begins. The more solid your blueprint, the sturdier the final structure. And you'll thank yourself when unexpected challenges arise and you have the bandwidth to handle them because you didn't skip the groundwork.

1. Define Your Theme, Goals, and Success Metrics
Before anything else, get clear on what your hackathon is about and what you want to achieve. Start by choosing a theme or focus area, which could be a specific technology like AI or blockchain, a problem domain like privacy or payment, or an open-ended challenge. Your theme attracts the right participants and helps sponsors see the relevance to their products.

Next, articulate your goals. Are you trying to grow a developer community, generate innovative solutions to a specific problem, give sponsors access to talent, or provide educational opportunities for beginners? Different goals lead to different design choices throughout the process.
Finally, define what success looks like in concrete terms. Set measurable targets such as number of registrations, number of valid submissions, hacker satisfaction, sponsor satisfaction, or media coverage. Having these benchmarks early helps you make tradeoffs when resources get tight and gives you a clear way to evaluate the event afterward.
That said, keep your targets grounded in reality. Consider the size of developer communities you can reach, the user base of any required technology, and how competitive your prize pool is compared to similar events. Ambitious but achievable goals motivate your team without setting everyone up for disappointment.
2. Identify What Resources You Need
Once you know your goals, map out the resources required to achieve them:
The budget needed for prizes, marketing, and tooling.Connections you have to reach out to potential sponsors, communities, or media outlets.Tools and platforms you'll need for submissions, communication, and judging.External contributors you need and how many hours per week they can commit.
Be specific. If you want a $10,000 prize pool, you need ready funding or sponsors willing to contribute that amount. If you want 500 participants, you need marketing reach to attract them. Identifying resource requirements early reveals gaps you need to fill before moving forward.
3. Understand Your Audience: Who and Where
Think carefully about who you want to participate. Are you targeting university students, early-career developers, experienced professionals, or a mix? Are you focused on a specific region, country, or going fully global? What skill levels and backgrounds do you want to include?
Understanding your audience shapes nearly everything: the language and tone of your marketing, the platforms where you promote the event, the complexity of your challenges, the size of your prizes, and even the timing of your hackathon. A hackathon for Southeast Asian university students looks very different from one targeting senior developers in North America.

Once you know who, figure out where they spend time online. This might be X, Discord communities, Reddit, LinkedIn, university mailing lists, or developer forums. Knowing where your audience gathers determines your marketing strategy.
4. Research Existing Hackathons
You don't need to figure everything out from scratch. Study how successful hackathons operate and learn from their approaches. Participate in a few hackathons yourself to experience them from a hacker's perspective. Read their rules, observe their communication style, and note what works and what frustrates you as a participant.
Explore platforms like DoraHacks (https://dorahacks.io)  to see how top hackathons structure their challenges, prizes, and timelines. Pay attention to how they write their rules, what submission requirements they set, and how they handle judging. Reach out to organizers of hackathons you admire and ask for advice — most are happy to share their experiences and lessons learned.
Learning from others helps you avoid common mistakes and adopt proven practices.

5. Clarify Team Roles and Responsibilities
Whether you're building a team from scratch or working within an existing organization, get clear on who does what. Typical roles include partnerships, marketing and community outreach, participant support, platform and technical operations, and judging coordination.
Assign clear ownership for each area and establish how decisions get made. Ambiguity about responsibilities leads to dropped balls and frustration. Even a small team benefits from explicit role definitions, and larger organizations need this even more to avoid duplication of effort or gaps in coverage.
Do set up regular check-ins to track progress and surface blockers early.

6. Choose Your Platform and Learn It Inside Out
Selecting the right hackathon platform is one of your most consequential decisions. DoraHacks (https://dorahacks.io)  is the best platform for you to kickstart without any fees, providing enough flexibility and a powerful organizer dashboard. Sometimes organizers also use private forms or spreadsheets for registration. Evaluate platforms based on submission and judging features, customization options, cost and pricing model, ease of use for both organizers and participants, and community or support available.

Once you choose a platform, learn it thoroughly from both perspectives, as a hacker and as an organizer. Set up a test hackathon and go through the organizer workflow: creating the event page, setting rules, configuring judging criteria, and managing submissions. Then experience it as a participant: register, submit a mock project, and see what the process feels like. Understanding both sides helps you write clearer instructions, anticipate participant confusion, and troubleshoot issues quickly during the live event.
7. Set a Realistic Timeline
Work backwards from your target hackathon date. Most online hackathons need one to two months of preparation, with more ambitious events requiring longer. Map out key milestones: when sponsorship outreach needs to start, when marketing launches, when registration opens and closes, when the hacking period runs, when judging happens, and when you announce winners.
Build in buffer time. Sponsor conversations take longer than expected, approvals get delayed, and unexpected issues arise. Account for external factors like school exam periods, major holidays, or competing events that might affect participation.
If the timeline feels impossibly tight, consider pushing the date back. A well-executed hackathon a month later beats a rushed one on your original date.
8. Decide If You're Ready
After working through all of the above, take an honest look at whether now is the right time to move forward. Do you have the resources you need or a realistic plan to get them? Is your team aligned and committed? Does the timeline work for everyone involved?
If gaps remain, it's better to address them before launching than to struggle through an under-resourced event. Consider joining another hackathon's organizing team first to gain experience, or scale down your ambitions to something more achievable for a first event.
When everything checks out, you're ready to move from step zero into active organizing.
Feel free to explore DoraHacks (https://dorahacks.io)  for more features supporting your hackathon, or talk to an expert  today (https://dashboard.dorahacks.io/contact-representatives)!
About DoraHacks
DoraHacks (https://dorahacks.io)  is the leading global hackathon community and open source developer incentive platform. DoraHacks provides toolkits for anyone to organize hackathons and fund early-stage ecosystem startups.
DoraHacks creates a global hacker movement in Web3, AI, Quantum Computing and Space Tech. So far, more than 30,000 startup teams from the DoraHacks community have received over $300M in funding, and a large number of open source communities, companies and tech ecosystems are actively using DoraHacks together with its BUIDL AI capabilities for organizing hackathons and funding open source initiatives.
Website: https://dorahacks.io/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DoraHacksDiscord: https://discord.gg/gKT5DsWwQ5Telegram: https://t.me/dorahacksofficialBinance Live: https://www.generallink.top/en/live/u/24985985Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DoraHacksGlobal

By Steve Ngok, Chief Strategy Officer, DoraHacks
If you look at the raw data, "human trading" is already a myth.
Today, over 70% of global trading volume, from the New York Stock Exchange to Forex markets, is executed by algorithms, not hands.
For decades, this superpower was an exclusive club. It belonged to high-frequency trading firms and institutional hedge funds with the budget for million-dollar infrastructure and armies of PhDs. The retail trader was left on the sidelines, armed with nothing but a chart and their intuition, fighting against machines they couldn't see.

But AI has broken that monopoly.
We are witnessing a massive redistribution of power. Generative AI and Agentic workflows are giving every individual the tools to build their own "Personal Quant."
Information Advantage: AI can process first-hand information, news, sentiment, and earnings calls, instantly, a task that used to take teams of analysts.Strategy Design: It allows non-coders to articulate complex trading logic in plain English and have it converted into executable code.Execution: It enables "Set and Forget" automation, removing emotional error from the equation.
This shift unlocks an explosion of opportunity. We are about to see a wave of new startups building "Trading Agents as a Service," and a demand for exchanges to support smarter, automated features beyond simple limit orders.
This is the core reason to organize an AI Trading Hackathon.
You are incubating the ecosystem of tools, agents, and startups that will define how the next generation interacts with your market.
And here is the blueprint on how to do it.
1. The Paradigm Shift: From "Bots" to "Agents"
Why is this different from the "Algo Competitions" of 2015?
In the past, you wrote a script. It was static. If the market changed, your script died. Today, we are testing Adaptive Intelligence.
An AI Trading Hackathon isn't about who can write the fastest Python loop. It tests for agents that can:
Learn: Digest news, sentiment, and price action simultaneously.Iterate: Recognize when a strategy is failing and adjust parameters in real-time.Survive: Manage risk by understanding volatility regimes.
2. The Methodology: How to Build the Arena
An AI Trading Hackathon is both a marketing campaign and a scientific experiment. I recommend two distinct approaches: The Narrative Battle (Aster) and The Ecosystem Builder (WEEX).
Here is how they work.
Approach A: The "Narrative Battle" (Aster Case Study)
Goal: Viral marketing, high drama, and proving the "Man vs. Machine" thesis.
The Aster Example: Aster DEX recently launched a campaign (https://docs.asterdex.com/trading-campaign/human-vs-ai-battle-for-the-futures-usd200-000-reward-pool) that perfectly encapsulates the "Kasparov vs. Deep Blue" energy. They invited Humanity to defend its title.
The Hook: "Team Humarn vs. Team AI."The Incentive (The Asymmetric Bet): They funded 100 human traders with 10,000 USDT "House Money" each.Zero Downside: If the human loses money, the platform covers it.Unlimited Upside: If the human profits, they keep every dollar.The Rivalry: The prize pool dynamics were designed to fuel the conflict.$100,000 prize for the #1 trader... but only if a human wins. If an AI takes the top spot, the prize burns.If "Team Human" beats "Team AI" in aggregate ROI, the total prize pool doubles.The Constraint: To keep it fair, the AI side was restricted to "Prompt-Only" control (using models like GPT-5, DeepSeek, Gemini). No fine-tuning, no memory, no external tools. Just raw intelligence vs. human intuition.
Why this works: It gamifies the existential threat of AI. It turns a standard trading comp into a spectator sport.
Approach B: The "Ecosystem Builder" (WEEX Case Study)
Goal: Developer acquisition, infrastructure stress-testing, and long-term strategy incubation.
The WEEX Example: While Aster focused on the "Battle," WEEX focused on the "Build." Their campaign, AI Wars: Alpha Awakens (https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/weex-ai-trading), was designed as a rigorous engineering challenge.
The Scale: A massive global event ending in Dubai with an 880,000 USDT prize pool.The Rules: Unlike the "prompt-only" constraint, WEEX encouraged full-stack engineering.Open Source: Participants must submit GitHub repos. This builds a library of open-source tools for the WEEX ecosystem.Anti-Gambling: Strict leverage caps (20x) and minimum trade counts (10+) to ensure the AI is winning on logic, not luck.The Pipeline: Winners are fast-tracked into the WEEX AI Strategy Fund.
Why this works: It effectively crowdsources your R&D. Instead of hiring 50 internal quants, WEEX let the global developer community build and test strategies for them.
3. The Blueprint: Inputs & Outputs
Regardless of which approach you choose (Drama vs. Engineering), the core requirements for the organizer are the same.
The Inputs (What you provide)
Data: Granular historical data for backtesting.Access: A sandbox or sub-account structure where agents can trade without risking life savings (or using House Money like Aster).The "Ground Truth": A scoring system that penalizes high drawdowns. PnL is vanity; Sharpe Ratio is sanity.
The Outputs (What you get)
By the end of the event, you possess:
Truth: Real data on how LLMs and Agents perform against live liquidity.Talent: A filtered list of developers who understand your API better than your own QA team.Sticky Users: A developer who spends 3 months optimizing a bot for your specific order book is unlikely to leave for a competitor.
4. The ROI: Why Platforms Should Care
Why should a CEO authorize the budget for this?
1. The "Personal AI" Future
If we believe that in 3 years, every trader will have an AI assistant, the platform that captures the AI developers today wins that future. You want the standard for AI trading to be built on your API.
2. Narrative Dominance
People have always wondered about who could built the best AI trading strategy as well as who could beat that with pure instinct and skills. It builds a really positive, merit-based culture around your brand when both the best AI builders and traders are on your platform.
3. Extreme Stress Testing
Humans trade slowly. Agents trade instantly. Nothing validates your matching engine, your latency, and your risk engine better than thousands of AI agents hammering your system simultaneously.
5. The Ecosystem: Who Should Build the Arena?
The AI Trading stack is deep, and every player in the infrastructure layer has a strategic reason to organize or sponsor such an event.
Here is who needs to be involved:
1. The Venues: CEX, DEX, and Neo-Brokers
The obvious hosts. For them, the goal is simple: Sticky Liquidity.
Traditional Neo-Brokers (Robinhood, Webull, eToro): This is the next frontier for retail apps. You moved from "stock tips" to "easy UI." The next step is "AI Trading Assistants." Hosting this hackathon positions you as the bridge between old finance and the AI future.Centralized Exchanges (Binance, OKX, Coinbase): You have the deepest liquidity. You run this to transition from "retail gamblers" to "institutional algo-clients" who trade 24/7 on your API.High-Performance DEXs (Hyperliquid, Aster, Aerodrome): Your entire value proposition is "Speed and Transparency." An AI competition is the ultimate proof that your on-chain matching engine can handle high-frequency robotic flows just as well as a CEX.
2. The Nervous System: Oracles & Data Infrastructure
AI agents are only as good as the data they consume. These protocols are the "food suppliers" for the agents.
Oracles (Chainlink, Pyth): An AI agent needs trustworthy, low-latency price feeds to survive. A hackathon is the perfect showcase to prove that your oracle updates faster and more accurately than the competition during high volatility.Decentralized AI Networks (Allora, Bittensor, Near): These protocols are building the "brain" on-chain. A trading competition is the best way to prove utility. Instead of abstract chat-bots, show that your decentralized models can actually generate Alpha (profit).
3. The "Shovels": Tools & Analytics Providers
These platforms provide the signals that AI agents interpret.
On-Chain Data (Arkham, Dune, Nansen): Your data is the "Alpha." Partnering with an exchange allows you to say: "The winning bot used Arkham data to predict the crash 5 seconds before it happened."Automation Platforms (3Commas, Hummingbot): You are the interface. You should be organizing these events to source new strategies to sell back to your user base.
4. The High-Speed Rails: L1 & L2 Blockchains
High-Throughput Chains (Solana, Monad, Sui): AI trading requires speed. Slow block times kill agents. Organizing a hackathon is a technical flex: "Look at how many transactions per second these bots executed on our chain without crashing the network."
The takeaway is clear: The next "killer app" for all these platforms isn't a new token, it's the AI Agent that uses them. The hackathon is the acquisition funnel.
Conclusion
We are witnessing the "Kasparov Moment" for financial markets.
Maybe the skeptics are right. Maybe AI cannot replicate the gut instinct of a veteran trader. Maybe the "Human Intuition" that Aster is betting on will prevail.
Or maybe, as WEEX is betting, the future belongs to the engineers who build systems that never sleep.
There is only one way to find out. Build the arena, open the API, and let them fight.

Hi DoraHacks Community,
Today, we are introducing Supervised Fully-Autonomous Hackathon (FAH) Mode in the DoraHacks Dashboard. It adds co-organizing capabilities and consolidates existing Hackathon AI features into a single console, allowing you to manage AI automation from one place.
FAH is supervised. DevRels and hackathon organizers are playing a critical role to supervise and guide progress of your hackathons. What FAH enables your organization to do is to run much bigger, and many more hackathons with your current team!
FAH Mode is ready out of the box. Turn it on, customize modules as needed, and stay in control while DoraHacks runs in the background.
How to Activate
FAH mode is available for DoraHacks Premium subscribers. Just navigate to your hackathon in Organizer Dashboard > Overview > Customize FAH Settings to toggle it on.

Turn on Supervised FAH
Once you turn on FAH in your organizer dashboard, DoraHacks Hackathon AI will perceive and understand your hackathons in real time. It performs all the tasks listed below, but the most important part of FAH is its understanding. Based on this, FAH will co-organize the hackathon with you - and for you.
FAH capabilities will improve over time.
What FAH Mode Automates for You
· Auto-Review of BUIDLs:
Automatically reviews BUIDL submissions with AI, with customizable requirements and approval thresholds.
· AI Judging:
Automatically runs AI Judges for prizes and bounties based on configurable judging criteria.
· Smart Auto-Reply to Hackathon “Ask a Question” tab:
Automatically answers hacker questions on the Ask Questions page using AI-powered context and knowledge.
· Automatic Handling of In-site Messages (New):
Hackathon AI collects specific inquiries from direct messages from hackers for organizer’s review, while handling greetings and simple messages automatically.

· Telegram Bot Notifications:
Delivers real-time Hackathon AI notifications directly to your Telegram chats or groups.
· Hacker Source Analytics:
Tracks participant sources through UTM links and provides detailed hacker origin analytics.
Why FAH Matters
FAH provides an entirely new level of capabilities to DoraHacks hackathon communities and DoraHacks hackathon organizers. It also brings all existing Hackathon AI features into one place, giving you a simple way to turn automation on and stay in control from the Dashboard. It helps you run more hackathons, and more scalable hackathons. Try it today!
Ready to experience the future of hackathon organization?
Go to Dashboard & Activate FAH Now: https://dashboard.dorahacks.io/
Happy Hacking,
The DoraHacks Team

Launching Amazon Q’s First Global Flagship Hackathon
Author: Steve Ngok, Chief Strategy Officer, DoraHacks
Overview
Amazon Q is Amazon’s flagship AI product for developers. In a highly competitive AI tooling landscape, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team partnered with DoraHacks to launch its first-ever global flagship hackathon, the AWS Global Vibe: AI Coding Hackathon ( https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/awsvibecoding ), designed to introduce Amazon Q and Amazon Kiro to developers worldwide and drive real, measurable adoption.
Powered by DoraHacks’ global developer network and AI capabilities, the collaboration was structured as a scalable, repeatable developer go-to-market (GTM) engine for Amazon, one that converts global developer interest into long-term product usage.
The First Global Flagship Hackathon for Amazon Q
AWS Global Vibe marked Amazon Q’s debut as a global, developer-facing hackathon brand. The hackathon invited developers globally to explore Amazon Q’s capabilities through hands-on building.
By harnessing the network and organizational tooling of DoraHacks, , AWS was able to:
Reach developers across multiple regions simultaneouslyShowcase real-world use cases of Amazon Q in production-grade workflowsPosition Amazon Q and Kiro as the default AI tools for modern developers, not just experimental products
A High-Impact Incentive Structure, Powered by a Partner Network
To ensure strong participation and high-quality submissions, the incentive structure was designed at scale.
AWS made up to $100,000 in startup activate credits available to winning teams.
In collaboration with DoraHacks, the hackathon was also supported by a host of elite sponsors including GitLab, SuperAI, Draper University, Minfy, Lovable, and arcanum.ai, contributing additional credits, AI services, and startup resources.
In total, developers competed for combined incentives worth over $700,000 USD, including cloud credits, AI tooling, and venture-facing opportunities.
DoraHacks leveraged its network of top Web3 ecosystems to onboard Circle, Somnia, Seedify, Zetachain, NodeOps, and Babylon as additional bounty sponsors, expanding the incentive surface area and providing developers with meaningful post-hackathon support.
Activating a Global Developer Network at Scale
Through DoraHacks’ global developer distribution and AI-powered campaign infrastructure, the hackathon achieved the following outcomes:
Reached 300,000+ developers and 30,000 startups worldwideConverted 900+ developer teams into the Amazon ecosystemReceived 200+ startup ideas and early-stage products built directly on Amazon Q
The focus was on real usage, real teams, and real conversion, turning experimentation into adoption.
From One Campaign to Long-Term Growth
Beyond the initial hackathon, AWS and DoraHacks established a deeper, long-term collaboration.
Across DoraHacks, one of the world’s most influential hackathon and developer platforms, Amazon Q (alongside Kiro) will become a default developer tool in large-scale hackathons organized by other leading companies and organizations.
Through ongoing credit programs and integrated developer workflows, AWS gains:
Continuous exposure across diverse ecosystemsRecurring touchpoints with new developersA sustained pipeline of qualified, high-intent users
This model transforms hackathons from isolated events into a persistent growth channel.
AI-Powered Judging Co-Pilot
A critical challenge in large-scale global hackathons is judging quality at speed. During the Amazon Q Global Vibe Coding Hackathon, the AWS team leveraged DoraHacks’ Hackathon AI Judging system to fundamentally change how project evaluation was conducted.
By combining structured evaluation criteria with AI-assisted review workflows, the AWS team completed high-quality judging of over 200 project submissions within a single day, a process that traditionally takes multiple weeks and significant coordination.
AI Judging enabled the team to:
Automatically pre-screen and cluster submissions based on technical depth and relevanceSurface high-potential projects for deeper human reviewMaintain consistent evaluation standards across a large and diverse submission set
The system amplified the human judging process, allowing AWS reviewers to focus on substance and decision-making, while automation handled scale and structure.
This capability proved essential in making a global flagship hackathon operationally viable, and demonstrated how AI-driven judging can unlock entirely new levels of efficiency for enterprise-grade developer programs.
Hackathon Automation with FAH
As a DoraHacks Premium Partner ( https://dorahacks.io/buidl-ai ), the AWS team also gains access to DoraHacks’ FAH (Fully Automated Hackathon) capabilities.
FAH enables:
Automated design, launch, and management of hackathonsMulti-theme, multi-region events led by different internal teamsA reduction of over 90% in operational and management overhead
This allows AWS to scale global developer GTM efforts without increasing internal headcount or operational complexity.
From Hackathon to Unicorn: Automated Startup Ecosystem Management
The collaboration extends beyond hackathon execution.
Using DevRel AI, AWS can:
Automatically track and manage top-performing teams emerging from hackathonsMonitor product development progress and Amazon Q usage over timeMaintain long-term relationships with high-potential startups
This creates a fully automated startup ecosystem management loop, significantly improving post-hackathon developer retention and long-term value realization.
Conclusion
The AWS × DoraHacks collaboration demonstrates how global hackathons, when combined with AI-driven automation and ecosystem management, can become a scalable, repeatable growth engine.
This partnership is about building infrastructure for continuous developer adoption.
For AWS, it marks the beginning of a long-term, system-level approach to global developer GTM.

Launch a hackathon for free in minutes: https://dorahacks.io/blog/guides/how-to-create-a-hackathon/Learn more about DoraHacks Premium / BUIDL AI: https://dorahacks.io/buidl-ai

About DoraHacks
DoraHacks is the leading global hackathon community and open source developer incentive platform. DoraHacks provides toolkits for anyone to organize hackathons and fund early-stage ecosystem startups.
DoraHacks creates a global hacker movement in Web3, AI, Quantum Computing and Space Tech. So far, more than 30,000 startup teams from the DoraHacks community have received over $300M in funding, and a large number of open source communities, companies and tech ecosystems are actively using DoraHacks together with its BUIDL AI capabilities for organizing hackathons and funding open source initiatives.
Website: https://dorahacks.io/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DoraHacksDiscord: https://discord.gg/gKT5DsWwQ5Telegram: https://t.me/dorahacksofficialBinance Live: https://www.generallink.top/en/live/u/24985985Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DoraHacksGlobal

Eric Zhang

The Hacker Movement

The world’s first hackathon was reportedly organized in 1997 by a group of Canadian cryptographic developers, 20 years after Donald Knuth released one of the world’s first open source software TeX.

In 2003, Paul Graham pointed out in his “Hackers and Painters” that hackers were often confused in a computer science department because they were taught to write research papers while they really wanted to build beautiful things (software).

So, what is a hacker? It can be best characterized by Eric Raymond’s hacker ethos in his article “How To Become A Hacker” (2003).

The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

Boredom and drudgery are evil.

Freedom is good.

Attitude is no substitute for competence.

This is a quite different approach — while schools and universities teach people to learn something then probably build something, hackers identify problems and build to solve the problems first. They learn necessary techniques while building the solution.

The drastically different approaches led to a different way to deal with problems. While most people followed the school tautology that “if you want to build something, you need to learn everything underneath it”. The attitude changed since then, and there was a great awakening among the developer community. The hacker spirit was widely accepted, and the hacker movement was spawned. The hacker movement really took off when open source software started to grow tremendously.

There was a linkage between the open source / free software movement and the hacker movement. If someone wants to “hack” something and solve a problem by her own, she must be able to focus on the problems and take whatever available to tackle the problem itself. There is no time for a hacker to reinvent a wheel — a hacker utilizes whatever that is available to solve the problem. If there was no open source software widely available, it would be difficult for many to become hackers when intellectual properties are controlled by big companies. An obvious example of our time is — if Bitcoin was not open source (or even worse if the technology had been “patented”), the founding team of Ethereum would have a really hard time to even start the project, then the world would lack a lot of creativity and fun.

Coordination was also important. In the early 2000s, people were still passing around flash drives containing git repos or building local networks for code version control. The creation of GitHub was important to the open source community. GitHub invented a standard workflow of remote git repository collaboration, and a platform for sharing open source software globally. With the rapid growth of GitHub (and other platforms like GitLab), software around the world became accessible to everyone, and developers across the globe can work together on the same repos without any geographical barrier.

By early 2010s, the open source tech stacks had become more sophisticated and well-adopted than the close-sourced tech stacks in many fields. In the then- Silicon Valley, most startup companies started to heavily rely on open source tech stacks. Big companies were building their own open source software or supporting open source repos they feel are strategic to their business.

The widely available open source tech stack also gave opportunities to university students, community developers, and startup engineers to learn, contribute and build. With open source software, developers could build without permissions from big companies. They can learn by themselves, build impactful technologies and products by themselves, the era of permissionless innovation started.

The idea of becoming a “hacker” in Eric Raymond’s book came true, and a global hacker movement took off.

The Development of Global Hackathons

A hackathon movement took off around 2010 in US universities. The first wave of hackathons were organized in universities around 2010. In 2013, MHacks became one of the largest university hackathon organizers among others (PennApps, CalHacks, HackMIT, and so on), attracting more than 1000 hackers to attend in a single event. Students who attended these hackathons were able to learn new open source technologies, team up with other hackers, contribute to open source projects, and implement their own ideas into products. Most importantly, they could focus themselves on a product or a problem during the hackathon (24–72 hours) with other hackers.

The movement soon spread to other parts of the world and many more organizations. In Europe. The European Organization of Nuclear Research hosted the first CERN Webfest since 2012, and continued organizing annual hackathons till this year, boosting many open source scientific software, games, toolkits, and open libraries. In the UK, Oxford University’s OxHack and Cambridge University’s Hack Cambridge are hosted annually. Other hackathons include Hack Kings at King’s College, IC Hack at Imperial College, and many more.

The first university hackathon organized in China was Tsinghua University’s THacks in 2014. Between 2014 and 2015, Peking University, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Beihang University organized their first hackathons too. Between 2014 and 2017, there were more than 100 hackathons organized in China. In 2019, the largest hackathon in China “The 4th Industrial Revolution Hackathon” (the 4IR Hackathon) was organized in Beijing. In 2014, few developers knew what a hackathon was. By the time of the 4IR Hackathon in 2019, being a hacker had become a cool idea among Chinese developers, and hackathon became a “must-attend” event for every hacker.

Similar movements happened in India, South East Asia, Korea, Japan, Africa, and other parts of the world.

Hackathons also became a way to boost innovation within corporations. Y Combinator organized hackathons each year before the COVID pandemic and each event had a few hundred participants. In 2018, ~18,000 developers joined a private hackathon organized by Microsoft. The list goes on.

Hacker Movement Being Centralized

While the hackathon movement contributed to many interesting technologies, in the late 2010s, it became clear that the hacker movement was moving towards big companies, and further away from grass-root innovation. The Internet, as a main driver of open source innovation over the past 2 decades, became a place of monopolies. When monopolies dominate the economic interests, they also dominate the problems and ideas. Hackathon organizers rely on sponsorship dollars. When sponsorship dollars only come from big companies, and hackathon organizers struggle to compete for the sponsorships, hackathons are dominated by centralized powers.

In the process, big companies dominated hackathons and the hacker movement. The most remarkable event was Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub for $8 Billion in 2018. One of the largest centralized tech companies acquired the most important platform of open source software and hacker movement.

                                                            cHackathon (illust by L&Q)

While we could acknowledge many contributions made from the corporate world to the open source technologies, the open source movement and the hacker movement were created by hackers around the world, and they were made to free developers and hackers around the world from intellectual property monopolies to freely innovate. The crypto space might have become the only sukhavati for hacker movement and open source innovation without permissions. From the time Bitcoin and Ethereum were invented to the multi-chain ecosystem we see in 2020/2021, crypto is still boosting open source innovation from all over the place.

In the Crypto and the Web3 space, Hackathons became a major place for developers to team up and innovate in the very early days. Wanxiang Blockchain Labs organized the first large-scale blockchain hackathon in Shanghai late 2015, where Vitalik Buterin presented smart contract coding to the Chinese developers. Over the past 6 years, a large number of innovative technologies and products ACTUALLY conceived or implemented at hackathons.

However, without a fundamental mechanism change, the crypto hacker communities can just become as centralized as the Internet era within the next decade.

In order to truly create a hacker community for hackers, we need to decentralize the hackathon community and the hacker movement — creating a community governed by hackers, owned by hackers, and working for hackers.

Decentralize The Hacker Movement

Can we create a permanent hacker movement to bring permissionless innovation to everyone? Can we give equal opportunities to grass-root hackers? Can we help hackathon organizers (quite often open source repo maintainers) around the world raise funding not only from big companies? Can we allow everyone who wants to organize a hackathon to have the opportunity to host one?

We will not be able to answer these questions all at once. However, we can start creating some building blocks that are critical to the goal.

The good news is — there are many available infrastructures available now to build the decentralized hackathon communities upon. There’s a lot of experience and knowledge of hackathon organizing from existing hackathon organizers to share (MHacks, ETH Denver, ETH Global, DoraHacks, etc.). Crypto-native funding mechanisms (e.g. quadratic funding) have been pioneered by the Ethereum community and widely adopted by the whole crypto space via Gitcoin and DoraHacks. Decentralized governance is widely accepted by both the crypto communities and the developer communities, dGov toolkits are now widely available.

Hackathon DAO: Building A Decentralized Hackathon Community

The DoraHacks community is already supporting a decentralized community called Hackathon DAO that shares the same vision. The Hackathon DAO has already supported a USC blockchain hackathon. Nevertheless, it is worth a deeper discussion of what is needed to build such a community.b

                                                          Hackathon DAO (illust by L&Q)

We need to build a global community of hackathon organizers. Hackathon organizers can be everywhere. Most of the time, great hackathon organizers are not “professional event organizers”, they are hackers and open source contributors themselves. The Oxford-MIT-Palo Alto-Tanzania Tele Hackathon organized by Jacob Cole in 2014 at the Oxford computer science department common room (built graph visualization technology), and the UnitaryHack organized by the UnitaryFund in 2021 (solved bounties problems for several open source quantum computing libraries) are good examples. Hackers themselves have ideas, and they know what to build. More importantly, they organize hackathons not for organizing a hackathon, but for actually building something or solving problems. By building a community of hackathon organizers, we can allow hackathon organizers in different areas of the world to connect with each other and share critical resources for future hackathons.

We need to democratize and decentralize the funding of hackathons and hackathon organizers. Hackathon hackers can be funded via bounties (for problem solving) or grants (for implementing valuable ideas). Therefore a hackathon needs funding for either bounties or grants, sometimes both. One of the most important tasks of decentralizing hackathon organizing and eventually the hacker movement is to democratize the funding of the community. A decentralized funding mechanism is important to the autonomy of the community.

We need to open source the knowledge of organizing a hackathon. Although hackathons are effective for team building and problem solving, organizing a hackathon can be a hustle. Many hackers who wanted to organize a hackathon didn’t do so because there were a lot of details to figure out, tremendously increasing the entry barrier for a hackathon organizer. A practical, open source playbook for hackathon organizers will be useful if it can lower the barrier for new hackathon organizers.

The Hackathon DAO needs community governance. With a community of hackathon organizers and contributors, there will be a lot of decision making work. Governance works might include proposal processing, DAO spending, execution team election, and maintaining the rules themselves. Proposals will be mainly about funding hackathons, as well as plans for DAO developments. With good community governance mechanisms, the community should be able to direct the DAO to grow the base of global hackathon organizers, make hackathon organizing more accessible, sustain the DAO itself, and eventually make the hacker movement an infinite game for hackers to innovate.

Related Links

Donald E. Knuth — A.M. Turing Award(https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/knuth_1013846.cfm)

Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham(http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html)

How To Become A Hacker. Eric Raymond(http://vadeker.net/articles/hacker-howto.html)

unitaryHACK(https://unitaryfund.github.io/unitaryhack/)

Microsoft Hackathon(https://news.microsoft.com/life/hackathon/)