YHack is Yale's premier hackathon. This year marks our 11th annual Yale Hackathon! Taking place between October 5-6, 2024, we invite all students passionate about innovation, learning, and social impact to code, create, and collaborate on Yale’s campus. Expect a myriad of spectacular rewards, educational workshops, renowned guest speakers, and engaging activities throughout the event. Learn more at https://www.yhack.org/

Requirements

Hackers must select one of the four tracks—Sustainability, Education, Entertainment & Media, Healthcare—and build a functional application that meets the requirements of their track. All groups will prepare a short presentation of their project for the judges and submit their code to Devpost before 11:00 AM EST on Sunday, October 6th, 2024.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$13,600 in prizes
1st Place
1 winner

2nd Place
1 winner

3rd Place
1 winner

Health Track
1 winner

Education Track
1 winner

Media/entertainment Track
1 winner

Sustainability Track
1 winner

FetchAI
3 winners

Use FetchAI's AI tools to enhance your projects to be eligible!

LightBox
2 winners

Employ LightBox's industry-used APIs in your project to address the challenges of tomorrow.

ActualFood Award
3 winners

Related to the core values of ActualFood, address sustainability challenges in our society.

Wolfram Award
1 winner

Best DEI Hack sponsored by Fidelity
1 winner

At Fidelity, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are viewed as major keys to the success of their business, which is why they are challenging you to come up with innovative ways to create forward-thinking financial tech that promotes equality for all people! We want you to use your hacking skills to find and build solutions that put financial opportunities and resources within reach for all communities, creating accessible, sustainable, and/or inclusive solutions. The team with the best hack will win a Fidelity branded wireless charger for each team member!

Best Domain Name from GoDaddy Registry
1 winner

GoDaddy Registry is giving you everything you need to be the best hacker no matter where you are. Register your domain name with GoDaddy Registry for a chance to win a Hack from Home Kit! Each Kit contains wireless earbuds, blue light glasses, selfie ring light and a pouch for easy transport.

Most Creative Adobe Express Add-On
1 winner

Wacom Wireless Drawing Tablet & JBL Go3 Speaker
Adobe Express is an AI-first, all-in-one content creation app that makes it fast, easy and fun to design and share videos, images, PDFs, flyers, TikToks, logos and more. Best of all, it’s free to get started.

Add-ons in Adobe Express are simply extensions and integrations that are built upon very powerful APIs. These APIs provide access to the user’s document, connections to third-party tools, and so much more. You can extend the functionality of Adobe Express using add-ons to unlock new capabilities and workflows. Check out these add-ons to see what other cool ideas developers have implemented!

For this hackathon, we want you to build a creative add-on for Adobe Express. Users are looking for add-ons that involve assets like stickers or icons, work with presentations and data visualization, and work in roles like marketing and e-commerce. Build an Adobe Express add-on this weekend for a chance to win a Wacom Wireless Drawing Tablet and JBL Go3 Speaker for you and each member of your team!

*You can also submit to this prize category if you have a prototype idea for an add-on or have a partially completed add-on. As long as you’ve built with Adobe Express, we want to see your hack!

Best Use of Terraform
1 winner

Hashicorp Swag Bag

HashiCorp Terraform is a source available infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that makes building, deploying, and managing your projects even easier! Whether you’re working in the cloud or using local resources, Terraform can make managing and configuring your application simple and organized. From deploying Machine Learning models to spinning up virtual containers for your web applications, Terraform supports a wide array of cloud providers and services, taking the guesswork out of your next hackathon project. Dive into the documentation and discover all the ways Terraform can take the way you hack to the next level!

Best AI Application Built with Cloudflare
1 winner

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks enabling hackers like you to build, deploy, and deliver trusted applications, no matter where you are! With Cloudflare, you’ll have all the building blocks to create a full-stack application; from C3 (create Cloudflare command line) instance deployment to object storage. You can even run GenAI (LLMs, text to image, Voice to text etc..) in the cloud and leverage your AI functionality via API requests using Cloudlfare’s Workers AI! Enjoy Cloudflare’’s generous free tier to get started at no cost! This weekend, we want you to build an AI Application utilizing Cloudflare’s numerous services for a chance to win Arduino Kits for you and your team!

Sauce Labs Hot Sauce Raffle
1 winner

Sauce Labs empowers you to develop, test, and deliver top-tier web and mobile apps quickly and efficiently. Their unified platform makes automated testing and error monitoring easy to do, enabling you to save time building your hackathon project! Let Sauce Labs help resolve any issues with your code so you can get back to building an award winning hack. Make sure your project is hackathon-tested by signing up for a Sauce Labs account!

To spice things up even more, we're running the Sauce Labs Hot Sauce naming raffle and selecting up to 4 individual winners at this event. To qualify come up with a cool hot sauce name and submit it to the Sauce Labs raffle form for a chance to win some awesome swag including a backpack, beanie, and a bottle of Sauce Labs hot sauce!

Best AI Project with Databricks Open Source
1 winner

Databricks is an open analytics platform that helps you build, deploy, and maintain large scale data & AI solutions! Whether you’re working with large language models using Mosaic AI, storing data with Databricks Data Lakes, or deploying GenAI powered applications using MLflow, Databricks Open Source software has the tools you need to make your hackathon project state of the art.

Build an AI powered project utilizing Databricks Open Source projects like the ones mentioned, or Databricks friendly Open Source projects like LanceDB and Llama Index, for a chance to win some amazing prizes for you and your teammates! Check out the following link to see all qualifying Databricks' Open Source technologies.

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Aatif Belal

Aatif Belal
Manager - Applied AI at Deloitte

Deepakraj Dharmapuri Selvakumar

Deepakraj Dharmapuri Selvakumar
Senior Software Engineer at Audible Amazon

Vinod Goje

Vinod Goje
Speaker at LeadDev, Editor at InfoQ

Neha Surendranath

Neha Surendranath
Senior Technical Program Manager at LinkedIn

Ishaan Agarwal

Ishaan Agarwal
Product Manager at Square

Raakesh Premkumar

Raakesh Premkumar
Lead Machine Learning Engineer at Home Depot

Anna Yoshitsugu

Anna Yoshitsugu
Startup Advisor, previously at Uber and Coca-Cola

Judging Criteria

  • Innovation
    Originality and creativity of the idea — 25%
  • Technical Difficulty
    Complexity and technical challenges overcome — 20%
  • Design
    User experience and interface design — 20%
  • Impact
    Potential for real-world application and benefit — 25%
  • Presentation
    Clarity and effectiveness of the project pitch — 10%

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

Tell your friends

Hackathon sponsors

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.