Looking Back On Local Hack Day: Build
When starting out six years ago, Major League Hacking (MLH) set out with the mission of empowering hackers to learn, build, and share. As our 7th Local Hack Day has drawn to a close, we’re proud to see how much progress we’ve made toward that mission this year. By growing Local Hack Day from one to three events, we’ve been able to reach more hackers and make a bigger impact than ever before.
We are here with the full run-down of 2019’s Local Hack Day: Build, how it has helped us to grow our community, celebrate our hackers, and most importantly, put your experience and education first.
Local Hack Day By The Numbers
After months of caffeine-fueled planning, hundreds of local organizers helped bring to life Local Hack Day: Build and make it the best event yet. Their success and the success of every individual that participated in this event series is reflected in the numbers below.
We had thousands of attendees worldwide in over 200 locations. Organizers were wildly successful in bringing together their local hacker communities. This year, 93% of all participants had never been to a Local Hack Day before attending this event!
The internet was buzzing with over 3,000 #LocalHackDay tweets and there was swag everywhere. We sent out over 250,000 stickers just for this event! That’s a lot of swag!
Big Thanks To…
Local Hack Day is made possible through the collaboration of some incredible people:
- Our presenting partner Microsoft and tech-pioneer sponsors GitHub and Verisign.
- Our fabulous swag partners Glitch, Devpost, Hack Club, and Sticker Mule, for decking out our hackers with some of the coolest stickers we have seen yet.
- The amazing mentors from Microsoft and Github who staffed the global Slack community around the clock to make sure your questions got answered!
- The hundreds of organizers who work day in and day out to plan all the Local Hack Day locations!
- The thousands of hackers who took time out of their week to create, collaborate, and grow together all over the world!
Our Contest Winners
We had some incredible submissions on Devpost for our three prize categories. While it was hard to pick our winners, we did our best. Winning projects are listed below.
Best Open Source Project on GitHub
🏆 portable-manhunt
🏆 SnailMailer
🏆 Music Recommender
Best Use of Microsoft Azure
🏆 LocalHackTweetAnalysis
🏆 Cloud-based Self-Healing Micro-services with Voice Assistant
🏆 Reconnect
Best .com Domain Name
🏆 Hinderme.com
🏆 TheGreatestDomainNameTheWorldHasEverSeen.com
🏆 Tinkerhubmesm.com
Best Octocat Drawings
Design by @JoyIzam 
Design by @Ros3Jos3ph 
Design by @efe_geo
Best Photo Submissions
Submitted by @markstgodard 
Submitted by @BluejackIsaac 
Submitted by @minibell_abdoul 
Submitted by @NdemoKelvin
Memorable Projects
Projects varied in every aspect imaginable. From bread naming projects to a web app that pairs you with someone to debate topics with, we’ve truly seen it all and hopefully get to see them demoed at Local Hack Day: Share. Keep up the great work and submit those projects to Devpost. We want to see ‘em! Winners will be announced soon but let’s keep this momentum going into 2020!
Our Favorite Moments
(Photos submitted by Laksh Matai, Richard Pepple (via Slack), YouthHax, Emma Ricii-De Luca (via Slack), Ross Cleary, University of Washington’s Mobile Development Club, Daniel Villamizar, Adnan Muhammad Mukhtar)
Your Octocats
What Did Hackers Say?
Hackers loved the experience of Local Hack Day: Build. Here are some of our favorite quotes from Slack and the post-event survey!
“The best part of the event was to learn from the mentors, they really helped us a lot to achieve what we wanted and also how we integrated the geolocation API”
“[The best part of the event so far was] the community and socializing of meeting people instead of sitting at home and coding/working on a project alone. It is a really amazing and memorable experience that I did not expect.”
“I bought some tech for the event and watched as the LocalHackDay participants figured out how to assemble a 3D printer and start printing. It was great to watch participants encourage each other and build some tech energy.”
“This is my first Hackathon, I heard about it on Twitter and I attended because I genuinely wanted to be a part of the largest hackathon in the world”
“I learned how productive hackathons are and the sessions were awesome. Learned a lot about GitHub, Python and Azure”
“I got inspired to become an organiser of #LocalHackDay for the sole aim of bringing different personalities together such developers, Content writers, Designers etc. to network, collaborate and build a solution to a problem in our society.”
“It was great to show up alone and meet a team there. I was really nervous at first, but my team was awesome and very helpful. I don’t know a lot of coders, so it was a great step into the community.”
“It was all about learning with the other people. The experience was fully magnifying. The connections I’ve made during the event are going to be important for the future. Added with the knowledge I’ve got during the workshops and the hackathon!”
“The best part about organising the LHD was the fact that we could gather so many enthusiasts and build a community through the event. It was great to connect with the participants and fellow organisers and we are happy that through the event, we could provide a platform to the participants to build amazing products.”
How can I get more involved in MLH?
If you had a good time at Local Hack Day and are looking to get more involved in the Major League Hacking community, we have a couple of easy and exciting ways for you to do just that.
MLH Localhost
If you are a part of a club or group of people who would be interested in hacker content, add Localhost workshops to your calendar! We have programming ranging from beginner to advanced experience levels and are happy to help you find the right match for your peers. These short workshops are organized so you can run them on subjects such as No-Code App Building, How to Build and Deploy Your First Website, Intro to Docker and many more. We bet your hackers will enjoy learning new skills and as well as learning them from you! Sign up today at https://localhost.mlh.io/
The MLH Hackathon League
Ready to join the big league? Host a weekend-long hackathon on your campus. These 24 to 48 hour events are a fun way to bring together 200+ students from campuses nearby to connect, code, and collaborate through challenges, contests, and workshops. Learn more about getting involved and starting the planning process here https://mlh.io/event-membership
MLH Local Hack Day: Share 2020
With two Local Hack Days under our belt in 2019, we are very excited for the third in this event series – Local Hack Day: Share. In April of 2020, communities around the world will gather to share what they have been working on throughout the year by hosting local Demo Days. Show us your works-in-progress, your finished projects, and everything in between. Share them through open source and updating your portfolios with us. Stay up to date with this at https://localhackday.mlh.io/share!
We look forward to continuing to empower hackers around the world in 2020. We hope to see you at Local Hack Day: Share in a few months.
Happy Hacking,
Emily & the MLH team