Announcing: Hackathon at Replay

To all you developers out there that felt you were missing something in your life, I have awesome news for you… for the first time ever, we’re hosting a Hackathon in Seattle! Alongside the Replay conference this year, we decided to bring something else to the community members who want to build applications with Temporal or try their hand at some rapid prototyping.

Earlier this year at our company offsite, we did a similar hackathon with Temporal employees, and we were so inspired by the unique ideas we saw that we wanted to bring this same type of event to our community. Some people used Temporal to Sync GitHub repos to Notion, others built a trivia game, and some built Python sample projects.

So, let’s get into the details—the who, what, when, and why:

Who

We are inviting you to join us one day early at Replay. Hackathon tickets are limited, so be sure to grab yours soon! You don’t need to have a team formed yet, but if you have some people in mind, we certainly encourage that! For those of you who want to find a teammate, let us know! After you register, you’ll be added to a private slack channel and then we can start formation from there with a common idea or language stack.

What

This hackathon is a little bit different from your average, garden-variety hackathon. This time around we’re focusing on building sample applications using Temporal.

When

This is day zero of the Replay conference, we hope you can join us to build some cool things, enjoy some food and drinks on us, and then if you have a Replay ticket, roll right into the conference and hear from our speakers over the next two days.

Monday, September 11th

Virtual Hackathon kick off (must be in invite-only Slack channel to get instructions)

Tuesday, September 12th

Onsite Hackathon kick off (Juniper meeting room at the Hyatt)

• 8am: Arrival and coffee
• 9am: Welcome, announcements
• 9:30am - 12:00pm: Morning hacking (staff will be wandering and available to help with questions)
• noon: Brown bag lunch provided
• 1:00pm-5:00pm: Afternoon hacking (staff will be wandering and available to help with questions)
• 5:00pm: Finish on-site portion of hackathon, head to the community happy hour (register here)
• ➡️Midnight: Submissions Due! (instructions will be given in Slack channel) ⬅️

Wednesday, September 13th

Day 1 of conference

Judges review projects

Thursday, September 14th

Day 2 of conference

Announcement happens in the afternoon from the founders on stage!

Why

As we continue to build our community, we want to create more opportunities to interact with you directly and make it easier for you to build applications. We hope that this can be the first of many other opportunities! You can come help shape future events, let us know how we can be doing better!

Rules

• You can and should form teams. Extra consideration will be given to applications created by teams that have both technical and non-technical members on them. (Teams are recommended to include at least 2 members, but you may participate as a single-member team as well.)
• You can build as many examples as you want and you can win in as many categories as you want.
• A single example application can win in multiple categories.
• Bonus points if you use one of the “younger” SDKs (.NET, TypeScript, and Python), but it’s not that many bonus points, so don’t stress over it.
• All submissions should have just a 5-minute quick video demonstrating the application and why it’s notable for whatever categories you’re submitting it to. Submissions due by 11:59PM PST September 12th.
• Earliest git commit cannot be before 12:01am PST September 11th.

Categories

Ghostwhisper: Simplest Example of Temporal

Sometimes, less is more. What is the simplest and easiest-to-grok example of Temporal. This category is a little bit different because we’re going to award four winners—one for each of the following languages: Go, Java, TypeScript, and Python. To win in this category, pay special attention to the little things: How easy is it to get the example up and running? How clear and concise is your documentation? This is true for each of the categories, but especially true for this one: We encourage non-technical members to team up with technical members and collaborate.

Emberglow: Breaking Temporal in Interesting Ways

The award is given to the example that either breaks Temporal in a particularly interesting way or puts it in a weird state. An entry into this category might expose an edge case in a single SDK, but the best examples will create chaos across multiple SDKs or within Temporal Server itself. Interesting examples in this category will get the server in the weird state and teach us a lesson on how you got there and interesting lessons we could learn debugging an application like this.

Moonclaw: Touches the Most Features

The award is given to the example that touches the most or the most esoteric Temporal features. We’re being intentionally vague here. Feel free to go for their breadth or depth—find a feature that is rarely used and build an example application around it. The best examples in this category will teach us why some of these lesser-known features can be super useful or explore a combination of features that are not otherwise used together.

Ghostfire: Most Unique Example

Can you put Temporal somewhere where you might not normally expect to find Temporal? Did you come up with a use case that no one has every thought of before? Are you riding the hype train? Did you hook Temporal up to ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot? Let your creativity go wild here and have fun. An example application in this category doesn’t need to be particularly useful, but it should be playful and interesting. Boring applications need not apply here.

Emberstrike: Founders’ Choice

There are no rules in this category other than what it says on the tin. In fact, you don’t even need to know that you’re applying for this category. It’s not objective or even particularly fair. The rules are simple: Whichever example application that Max and Samar like the most, that’s the winner. And if they can’t agree on one and like two of them? Then we’ll have two winners in this category.

Prizes

What kind of hackathon would be complete without prizes? We will have prizes for each of the categories and will be announcing them over the coming weeks! Some will be given at the event, some are digital and some will be… a surprise!

Does this sound like something you want to participate in? Come join us to kick off Replay in style, grab your ticket here and let’s start building!

Note: while we would love to see you at the Replay conference, we understand that not everyone can make it, and you are indeed able to do the hackathon as a standalone option. See you there!