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:

Record-breaking participation with open-source AI

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 9

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Winners!

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

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Clever projects using AI to force offline breaks

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 16

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass Winners!

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest

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Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 23

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Winners!

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #softwaredevelopment

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Highlights winning offline AI laziness tools

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 30

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Winners!

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #productivity

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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!

StackFeed

That's a Wrap on Hacktoberfest 2026! 🎃👻