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2025 Hackathon

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Lane Wagner
Lane Wagner

Last published July 25, 2025

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The 2025 Boot.dev Hackathon has been completed! We had an amazing turnout this year, with over 500 participants across two categories: Amateur and Pro. The projects were incredible, and the competition was fierce.

2025 Winners 🔗

Amateur Category 🔗

Top 3 Winners:

  1. Bunny
  2. Codemon
  3. Pokemon Code Battle

Runners Up (tied for 4th):

Pro Category 🔗

Top 3 Winners:

  1. CPU vs AI
  2. CodeOff
  3. BootdevMulti

Runners Up (tied for 4th):

12 Honorable Mentions (No prizes, sorry!) 🔗

Thank you for participating! 🔗

Thank you SO MUCH to our 500+ participants this year! These projects were incredible, and it was really hard narrowing it down to just a few winners. I’m sure we didn’t choose perfectly, but we did our best.

Remember, it’s not just about the shiny coins for winning… it’s the projects we made along the way. Add them to your portfolio/resume, and use them to show off your skills to future employers. And don’t forget to add them to your personal project or capstone project if you haven’t already!

Archived: Instructions for the 2025 Hackathon 🔗

Timeline 🔗

  • Submissions due July 28th 9:00 AM (Mountain Time)
  • Voting Due July 28th 12:00 AM (Mountain Time)
  • Winners Announced July 29th 9:00 AM (Mountain Time) - We’ve made this change so we have more time for manual review

Submission Instructions 🔗

Submit your project in this format as a single message in Discord to the proper submissions channel.

Github: https://github.com/my-username/my-repo
Post: https://linkedin.com/...
Title: <1-6 word project title>
Description: <Maximum 2 sentence description of the project>

Pro submission channel: #pro-hackathon-submit Amateur submission channel: #amateur-hackathon-submit

Voting Instructions 🔗

  • You must vote for at least 3 other projects in your category. You vote by starring their repo on GitHub.
  • You may vote for your own project as well (in this case at least 4)
  • You may vote for more projects if you wish (and we encourage it! It will help us get better results)

The Boot.dev team will use the votes to filter down to a reasonable number of submissions and then manually choose the winners.

We will view the votes as suggestions and as a way to manage the number of submissions - at the end of the day we have full discretion to choose whichever winners we think are most deserving.

You MUST vote before the voting deadline at noon on monday. You may vote before submissions close.

Judging Criteria 🔗

  • Creative awesomeness (how cool it is)
  • Technical awesomeness (how challenging it is to build)
  • Code quality (how well you implemented it)

Prizes 🔗

  • Top 10 in each category are physical event-specific commemorative coins
  • Top 3 winners in each category will also receive letters of recommendation
  • All winners will be listed on the Hackathon Page on the blog (if you want to use an alias, that’s fine, we’ll communicate with you should you win)

Misc Rules 🔗

  • You can work in groups of 1-3
  • If anyone in your team has held a (paid) job as a developer, you’ll compete in the pro category rather than the amateur category
  • All submissions must be submitted BEFORE the deadline, no exceptions
  • Any social platform can be used for the post, but the link must be publicly available and the post must not be “private” or “unlisted” in any way
  • You will be rated on the quality of your code and the awesomeness of the project - presentation MATTERS
  • You are NOT allowed to write any code for the before the kickoff event on Friday, but you may use assets from before (e.g. images)
  • You do NOT need to be a paying member to participate (but if you are we of course appreciate you :bootsheart: )
  • There is no specific theme for the hackathon - you can code whatever you like.
  • The project must be easily installable and runnable in under 5 minutes with clear instructions provided on the README
  • You MUST vote for at least 3 other projects. You may vote for your own, and you may vote for more than 3
  • You may use AI however you wish, but just like using library code, your pure-vibe-code will not be seen as “yours”, so use sparingly
  • You may use libraries, but you will be judged based on the code you built, so if it’s just a simple wrapper it won’t be seen as impressive
  • The easier it is to demo, see, install, and use your project, the better. You can host it, but you don’t have to. You can require API keys, but the judges may not have time to set them up, so be smart about the usability and presentation of your project.
  • Your social post should primarily be about your project, but it MUST mention that you build it for the Boot.dev hackathon, bonus points for tagging a bootdotdev social handle
  • There is no need to “enroll” - you participate simply by submitting an entry

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