Welcome to SFHacks 2024

Be prepared for our first in-person hackathon in 5 years! During this hackathon, we encourage you to build your wildest ideas and try out technologies that you’ve never heard of or used before.  This event is not only about problem-solving but also celebrating ingenuity. Explore and branch out of your comfort zone. Collaborate with others, learn from mentors, interact with company sponsors, and have fun!

The City Life Challenge Track encourages you to find innovative ways to tackle issues faced by everyday urban communities like here in San Francisco. Any project that attempts a challenge track will automatically receive a slight increase in the judging categories. Topics include transportation, housing, offices, restaurants, and so on.

Requirements

How to Submit

  • Your code must be available publicly (ideally in a git repository)
  • Your code must remain public post-event to be eligible for prizes. If your repo is not public, new winners may be selected.
  • You must have completed all registration steps for the hackathon.
  • You cannot submit projects that include prior work.

What to Submit

  • Provide a URL to your code repository for judging and testing. 
  • Team name and team members
  • Project description

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$9,252 in prizes
MLH: Best Domain Name from GoDaddy Registry
1 winner

Hack from Home Kit
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.

MLH: Best DEI Hack sponsored by Fidelity
1 winner

Fidelity Branded Wireless Charger
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!

MLH: Best Use of Flow
1 winner

$200 USD in FLOW Token
Flow is a public, decentralized, layer-one blockchain designed for creating limitless Web3 apps for mainstream adoption. Flow empowers hackers like you to build decentralized applications and share them with the world. Write safe and readable smart contracts with Cadence and explore the potential of composable, on-chain logic. With SDKs in multiple languages like Javascript, Go, Kotlin, Python, Swift, Unity, you can jump in and start your hack using Flow this weekend for a chance to win $200 USD worth of FLOW token for each member of your team!

MLH: Best Use of Kintone
1 winner

Breadboard IoT Kit
Still not sure what backend to use in your hack? Kintone is a low-code web database that lets you set up your backend in minutes. It's beginner friendly, allowing you to customize your Kintone app using nothing but JavaScript and HTML. Your team can snag a FREE microcontroller by signing up for Kintone and visiting the MLH table, and if you use Kintone in your hackathon project, you'll have a chance to win a breadboard IoT kit to power up the hardware hacking for each member of your team!

MLH: Best Use of AI in Education
1 winner

TickTime Pomodoro Timer
Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, such as large language models (LLMs), are transforming how we interact with computers. During this weekend's hackathon, we want you to apply AI towards improving education to produce tools that support the quality, accessibility, and equitability of learning in today's classrooms. You can use AI to address any challenge teachers and students face, such as curriculum planning, question selection, teacher training, content generation, personalized feedback, automated grading and more.

For this challenge, we encourage you to draw on your own educational experiences and propose technical solutions to problems you've regularly encountered as students — after all, you are the best to know where our education system needs improvement. Design impactful and effective AI tools for education for a chance to win a TickTime Pomodoro Timer!

MLH: Sauce Labs Raffle
1 winner

Sauce Labs Swag Bag
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 and running at least one test on the platform. Include a screenshot of your test results in your project submission to get entered into the Sauce Labs raffle for a chance to win a backpack, beanie, and a bottle of Sauce Labs' famous hot sauce for you and each of your team members!

SF Hacks: Best AI Hack
1 winner

This challenge invites you to develop an AI or use an
existing AI in your project.

Prize: OpenAI Swag Bags with GPT Plus sponsored by OpenAI & Echo Dots

SF Hacks: Best Hardware Hack
1 winner

Using your preferred hardware or hardware emulator, build a
hack of your choice.

Prize: Arduino Starter Kits and Raspberry Pis sponsored by SFSU CS Department

SF Hacks: Best Sustainability Hack
1 winner

Develop a hack that provides an innovative and practical solution that promotes sustainable development.

Prize: Air Fryer

SF Hacks: Best Design Hack
1 winner

Develop a hack with innovative and visually appealing user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX).

Prize: Dell 27 Inch Monitor

SF Hacks: Best First Time Hack
1 winner

You are eligible for this category if at least half of your team is made of 1st time hackers.

Prize: Airpods 3rd Generation sponsored by Fastly

Company Track: Best Use of AI and Verbwire API
1 winner

Top 15 Teams who use the Verbwire API and AI get premium API credits

Company Track: Most Innovative Use of Verbwire API
1 winner

Top 5 Teams who use the Verbwire API get premium API credits

Company Track: Best Use of Vectara
1 winner

1st Place: $1000 Vectara Credits
2nd Place: $500 Vectara Credits

Company Track: Best Use of Neurelo
1 winner

Apple Magic Keyboard

Company Track: Best Use of Neurelo with Hackathon Theme
1 winner

Sony Noise Cancelling Headphones with Mic

Company Track: Best Use of Fireworks.ai
2 winners

1st Place: $1000 Fireworks.ai Credits
2nd Place: $500 Fireworks.ai Credits

Company Track: Best Emerging Technology
1 winner

GoPro Cameras sponsored by Emerging Technologies Initiative

Company Track: Best Use of Coze
1 winner

Nintendo Switch Lites sponsored by Bytedance/Coze

Company Track: Best Use of Google Cloud
1 winner

Google Cloud Branded Backpacks and Water Bottles

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Chirag Shah

Chirag Shah
CEO of Neurelo

Nasser Shahrasbi

Nasser Shahrasbi
Director of Lam-Larsen Business Technology Initiative

Raymond Thai

Raymond Thai
Founding PM at Fireworks.ai

Joshua Alphonse

Joshua Alphonse
Staff Developer Advocate at ByteDance

Zara Zhang

Zara Zhang
GTM at Coze

Adam Leonard

Adam Leonard
Software Engineer

Allen Wang

Allen Wang
Software Engineer at Google

Arno Puder

Arno Puder
Computer Science Department Chair

Claudia Zhao

Claudia Zhao
Growth Lead Pave

Joseph Hui

Joseph Hui

Andrew Patterson

Andrew Patterson
Full-Stack Engineer at Stitchflow

shiva potu
LegalZoom

Delia Lazarescu

Delia Lazarescu
Software Engineer & Content Creator

Hari Manivannan

Hari Manivannan
Director of Customer Success at Mastercard

Luis Flores Martinez
Principal Software Engineer, Core Systems

Manika Kapoor

Manika Kapoor
NVIDIA

Pablo Lujambio

Pablo Lujambio
Cisco

Rodrigo Oliveira

Rodrigo Oliveira
CTO of Glassdoor

Sreenivasen R

Sreenivasen R
Engineering Manager at Yelp

Pranav Kashyap

Pranav Kashyap

Maulik Suchak
Apple

Kari Wu

Mark Kim

Mark Kim

Judging Criteria

  • Idea
    How well does it align with the theme and track?
  • Implementation
    All features presented are working. Complexity of project/features?
  • Design
    Is the user interface intuitive for users? How does the design lead users to different features? Is it scalable?
  • Presentation
    Why did you decide to make this your project/what problem are you trying to solve? Hardships and overcoming them (problem solving)? Clearly explain features.
  • Track Application
    How well did you utilize the technologies or problems of this track? Did you work with the challenge track?

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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Hackathon sponsors

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Bronze Sponsors
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Special Thanks!

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