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That's a Wrap on Hacktoberfest 2026! 🎃👻

Noah Brinker on November 03, 2026

Hacktoberfest 2026 wrapped up on October 31st! Thank you to everyone who built, hosted, mentored, judged, and tuned into Hacktoberfest this month. ...
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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ • • Edited

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

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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ •

Also, Completionist++!!!

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fm profile image
Fayaz •

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: 🥰


I didn't really fight for the stickers, so here's what came naturally 🥰

fm's sticker pack


Huge thanks to all the organizers and partners 🥰

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Tony •

I'm curious about the cons. What happened?

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fm profile image
Fayaz •

Nothing much, small things. For example:

  • I'd like it more if the DEV challenge topics and criteria were less restrictive.
  • making it only AI related didn't help.
  • PR should've had a part, even if they were in a more restrictive way.
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Kürşat Yılmaz •

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.

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Melwin Siril Joel V •

This is how my fest gone

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Kaushani Koner •

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. 💜

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Nilamadhab Senapati •

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.

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Tony •

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!

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Subarna Maity •

This is How it Gone

Week3 Challenge Winner and

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Ronak sarda •

Hey guys , checkout my latest project for Hacktoberfest
dev.to/ronaksarda/your-ai-is-heari...