Hacktoberfest 2026 wrapped up on October 31st! Thank you to everyone who built, hosted, mentored, judged, and tuned into Hacktoberfest this month. 🎉
This year, we focused on building with open-weight models and open source AI, at Fests around the world and online. Our hope was to bring the community together and WOW, so many of you showed up!
🎃 Hacktoberfest by the numbers
- 115,385 people took part, at in-person Fests and online, from Global Hack Week to DEV Challenges
- 500+ in-person Fests in 70+ countries and territories (our original goal was 300!)
- 50+ livestreams from the community, partners, and Global Hack Week programming
🏆 Meet the DEV Challenge winners
We ran five challenges this month, with one prompt and a new theme each time. Go say congrats to the winners and see what they built:
Week 4: Ghost in the Machine winners will be announced late this week!
📜 Claim your certificate
You have until November 14th to claim your certificate. Sign in to My Hacktoberfest to grab yours!
💬 What did you build?
We'd love to hear about it. Drop your project, your favorite Fest memory, or something you learned in the comments!
💜 Thank you
To our hosts, mentors, and judges: you gave your time to make the Fests happen, and we're so grateful.
A huge thank you to our presenting partner, DigitalOcean, and to this year's sponsors, who covered the Fests, the swag, and the participant packs that reached builders around the world: Arduino, Auth0, Backboard.io, Browserbase, ElevenLabs, Entire, Gauge, Gemma, GitHub, Google Cloud, IBM, Mastra, MongoDB, Paper Compute, Paper Instruments, Prior Labs, Qualcomm, Render, Sentry, SerpApi, Snowflake, Solana, .tech, Temporal, Thinking Machines Lab, Tiger Data, and TLDR.
Happy Hacking!
Top comments (13)
Yo Noah posting on the DEV team org??? Good stuff XD
Hope everyone had a good hacktoberfest! I wrote an article about my first time experience on this event and some feedback on it too! dev.to/francistrdev/this-is-my-fir...
If anyone is interested, feel free to share your sticker book here or in that article I linked! Would love to hear your guys' experience :D
Also, Completionist++!!!
There were pros and cons, but considering everything, I feel like this was the most eventful Hacktoberfest ever!
The most significant achievement I gained from this Hachtoberfest is the following project I've built. God willing, I'm certainly going to do a lot of work on this, as I myself will use it for sure: 🥰
Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼
From a Simple "Mark as Seen" to Feedgrab & Ghostify: Story of My Life!
I didn't really fight for the stickers, so here's what came naturally 🥰
Huge thanks to all the organizers and partners 🥰
I'm curious about the cons. What happened?
Nothing much, small things. For example:
hi how are you doing guys?
check out my latest hacktoberfest project - ANIMAS 3D game:
Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼
💀I'm the last mail carrier in the land of the dead. An open-weight model writes all the mail.
The obsession with wrapping remote APIs into multi-layered agent abstractions is creating massive hidden latency and failure cascades in production.
If you profile real-world workloads, bare-metal local inference (via direct C++ / llama.cpp or vLLM bindings) consistently beats fragile cloud wrappers on both predictability and cost. Tooling should eliminate abstraction penalties, not compound them.
This is how my fest gone
What an incredible Hacktoberfest! 🎃👻
This month pushed me to experiment beyond what I was familiar with and build something I probably wouldn't have attempted otherwise.
For the Week 4 – Ghost in the Machine challenge, I built Web Séance: an AI-powered digital archaeology tool that uses Gemma 3:4B locally through Ollama to investigate forgotten corners of the early internet.
The idea was simple but unusual: What if we could use local AI to explore the history of abandoned webpages without letting AI invent that history?
I tested it against an actual 1997 webpage, extracted 41 outgoing hyperlinks, and built an evidence-driven workflow to explore what those connections reveal — including what we still cannot know.
I'd love for the DEV team, judges, and fellow builders to take a look:
👻 Project: github.com/kaushanikoner20-hub/Web...
🎬 Interactive demo: kaushanikoner20-hub.github.io/Web-...
Thank you to everyone who made this Hacktoberfest possible. Regardless of the outcome, this challenge gave me an opportunity to build, experiment, and learn something genuinely new. 💜
500+ Fests when the goal was 300 is wild, congrats. This year I opened my own side project up with a few good-first issues instead of only hunting for repos to contribute to. Honestly, writing an issue clear enough for a stranger to pick up is harder than writing the code.
Thanks for organizing Hacktoberfest 2026. It was a fun experience participating, contributing to open source, and earning some stickers along the way. Unfortunately, I think I missed out on some of the activities this year. 😅 Hopefully, I can participate more actively next year. Looking forward to Hacktoberfest 2027!
This is How it Gone
Week3 Challenge Winner and
Hey guys , checkout my latest project for Hacktoberfest
dev.to/ronaksarda/your-ai-is-heari...