What's new on Hackathon Radar

The app's navigation has been redesigned from the ground up. Instead of a thin strip of icons, you now get a full sidebar with everything labelled and grouped into three sections: Hackathons for browsing events, judging opportunities, sponsors and organizers; Explore for stats and the State of Hackathons report; and Personal for your passport, favorites and settings.

Everything is one click away and you always know where you are. On smaller screens the same navigation slides in from the side, so nothing gets lost on mobile.

There's now a free, public list of hackathons happening right now or starting in the next few days, open to everyone on GitHub. It refreshes every day, so it's never the stale, half-abandoned list you usually stumble across.

It's the quickest way to see what's on this week and share it with your team — and every event links straight back here for the full picture, from the map to the months of events still ahead.

The Discover page has been rebuilt around how people actually browse. Nine themed categories — from AI to climate to gaming — sit front and centre, alongside far more cities so you can jump straight to the scene nearest you. Every event shows its status at a glance, the dates it runs, and the sponsors behind it.

Whether you're chasing a specific theme, a particular city, or just want to see what's happening soon, there's now a clear path in. Less scrolling, more finding the weekend that's right for you.

Organisers rarely spell out who shows up: students or seniors, founders or researchers, AI builders or hardware tinkerers. Every event now carries an estimated audience profile that reads the event's own details and paints a picture: experience level, the kind of people it draws, the technical focus, the industries in play, and signals like beginner-friendly or women-in-tech.

Every estimate comes with a confidence rating and the evidence behind it, so you can see why we think a crowd looks the way it does, and judge for yourself. It turns 'how many attendees?' into the question that actually matters when you're deciding where to spend your time or sponsorship: who's in the room.

Every hackathon card and detail page now carries a star. Tap it and the event drops into one personal favorites list that follows you across the whole site, so the weekend you spotted on the map is still there when you open the database an hour later.

It's a single universal list rather than a folder per view, which keeps the mental model simple: if it matters to you, star it, and it's all in one place. Favorites are tied to your account, so the list is the same whether you're on your laptop or your phone.

Email is now opt-in per category instead of all-or-nothing. Digests, new-match alerts, product news and launch announcements are each their own switch, so you can keep the updates you find useful and silence the ones you don't.

The goal is to make staying subscribed an easy call. Rather than unsubscribing from everything the first time one email misses, you trim it down to exactly what you want and the rest stops arriving.

You can now connect Hackathon Radar to AI assistants like Claude and let them search the database for you. Ask for upcoming events, filter by tech or prize pool, and get answers in the chat you're already using.

It works as you: the assistant only sees what your own account can, so everything stays in sync with your plan and preferences. No more switching tabs to look something up mid-conversation.

Hack Passport turns your scattered hackathon history into one credible profile. Track every event you've hacked, judged, mentored, organized, sponsored or spoken at, and collect a stamp for each one as your record builds up over time.

It's multi-role by design, because most people in this scene wear more than one hat across a year. The result is a single public link you can drop in a bio or an application that shows the full shape of your involvement, not just the weekends you happened to win.

New accounts now get a proper welcome on signup instead of landing on an empty dashboard. The email orients you around what Hackathon Radar does and points you at the first few things worth doing.

It's a gentler first run: rather than figuring the product out cold, a brand-new builder gets a short map of where to start and what's worth their time.

The homepage hero now previews real, live events on an interactive globe rather than a static graphic. It's an immediate sense of scale: hackathons happening all over the world, refreshed as new events ingest.

We lightened the surrounding effects and refreshed the call to action so the path from landing to browsing is shorter. See an event spin past that catches your eye and you're one click from the full database.

Save any search you've built — a region, a tech stack, a minimum prize pool — and Hackathon Radar will watch it for you. The moment a new hackathon matches, you get pinged, so you stop having to re-run the same search every few days.

Alerts reach you wherever you already are: email, Slack or Discord. Set up one saved search per thing you care about and let the matches come to you instead.

We widened the net considerably, adding far more events across web3, ML and general builder hackathons. The database now spans a much bigger slice of what's actually happening each week.

Everything arrives normalized — consistent dates, prize pools, locations and tags — so a listing reads the same no matter where it originated, and you can search and filter across all of it in one place.

An editorial, data-driven essay on where hackathons are heading, built on top of everything we ingest. It pulls the database into a single narrative about format shifts, prize-pool trends and the steady takeover of AI themes.

The centrepiece is a scrollable timeline that walks through the eras year by year, paired with a hi-res world map and a set of charts. It's the page the changelog you're reading borrows its look from.

Signing in and creating an account now happen right here, on pages styled to match the rest of the product, instead of bouncing you off to a separate-looking screen.

The result is a calmer first run: fewer jarring jumps, a consistent layout, and no moment where you wonder if you've landed somewhere you didn't mean to.

Drop a hackathon link in Slack, X or a group chat and it now unfurls into a proper preview card — title, image and detail — instead of a bare URL nobody clicks.

Pages also load faster and are far easier to find through search, so more hackathons turn up when people are looking, not just when they're already on the site.

A proper set of filters arrived, so you can narrow the calendar by the things that actually decide whether you'll enter — location, format, theme and prize pool — instead of scrolling past events that were never relevant.

It turned the database from a long list into something you can interrogate: a handful of clicks and you're looking at exactly the weekends worth your time.

Hackathon Radar began sending updates out to the other apps and services you use, so a new matching event can kick off whatever you've set up elsewhere automatically.

It's the groundwork everything automated since has built on — the same plumbing that powers today's alerts and assistant connections all started here.

Every hackathon got its own full page, with prize pool, organizers, sponsors and dates laid out properly rather than crammed into a table row. Interception routes let you peek at one in a modal without losing your place in the list.

These pages are also what made the database shareable and indexable — a real URL per event that holds up when it's dropped in a chat or surfaced by search.

The hackathon calendar began refreshing every day on its own, so new events appear and stale ones drop off without anyone updating listings by hand.

That daily cadence is what makes the database something you can rely on day to day rather than a snapshot that goes out of date the moment it's published.

Where it all started: a fast, searchable database of hackathons, with dedicated organizer and sponsor pages so you can explore the people and companies behind each event.

From day one it was built mobile-friendly, with accounts and notification settings wired in. Everything in this changelog since is a layer on top of that first foundation.