What's new on Hackathon Radar

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.