Dogfood 2026: Build the Platform That Will Judge You

Most hackathons ask you to build whatever you want. Dogfood 2026 does the opposite. Everyone builds the same thing: a submission and judging platform for hackathons. The challenge is simple: Build the platform that will judge you. And there is a reason this is more interesting than it sounds. Hackathon Raptors has run 35 hackathons across 85+ countries since 2023. They have seen the same problems appear again and again: registrations, teams, submissions, judge assignments, scoring, normalization, results, certificates, and exports all becoming separate pieces of an increasingly messy workflow. Now they want to build the platform they actually wish they had. That is what Dogfood is about. About the Hackathon Dogfood 2026 is a 72-hour online hackathon organized by Hackathon Raptors . The event runs from September 25 to September 28, 2026 . At a glance 🌍 Online and global ⏳ 72 hours 💰 $2,500 prize pool 👥 Solo or teams of up to 4 💸 Free to participate 🔓 Open source 🐳 Self-hosted 🛠️ Build with the stack of your choice But this is not a normal platform-building challenge. The winning project is intended to be forked, self-hosted, and used for actual Hackathon Raptors events. So instead of building a demo that gets abandoned after the weekend, you are building something that could become real infrastructure. Why Build Another Hackathon Platform? Hackathon platforms already have most of the features organizers expect. Registration. Team formation. Project submissions. Public galleries. Judge scoring. Community voting. Organizer dashboards. CSV exports. So what is missing? The difficult part is not building another CRUD application. The difficult part is making the entire system reliable when real people start using it. Consider judging. Two judges can look at the same project and give completely different scores. One might give almost everything a 4 or 5. Another might rarely give anything above a 3. Simply averaging those scores can produce a ranking that reflects the judg