What's new on Hackathon Radar

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.