Hackathon Raptors has run more than thirty online hackathons, and every one of them was decided by a judging panel assembled for that specific event. Judges have come from Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Cisco, Uber, Snap, Walmart, Sonos, Expedia, General Motors, Honeywell and Wayve, among others.
This page sets out how a panel is formed, what judges score against, and what the record shows afterwards. A judging role is worth what its process can be shown to be, so the process is written down here rather than described on request.
Each event opens a panel for its own subject. A candidate reaches us in one of three ways: a Fellow nominates them, we approach them directly, or they come to us. Every candidate is reviewed, and the review is against what that event actually needs judged rather than against a general standard. Panel slots are capped to those needs. A strong engineer in the wrong discipline is not seated on that event, and we say so rather than fill a seat.
Seated judges are confirmed in writing before the event opens, and the confirmation carries the schedule and the criteria they will be scoring against. As established in our Charter, Fellows of Hackathon Raptors serve as technical leaders and judges at our hackathons. Judging is open beyond the Fellowship. The governing documents are below.
Shipped systems
Production ownership
Open source
Domain depth
Code review at scale
Evaluation experience
Architecture decisions
Written feedback
Projects are grouped into batches of about ten to twelve. You receive one batch on a structured form, roughly a day after code freeze, and review it independently. You read code, run what runs, and write comments a team can act on. The written feedback matters as much as the number.
One to two hours of focused review across the judging window, which runs for about ten days after code freeze and is published with the rest of the event schedule. Everything is online and asynchronous. No live calls, no scheduled panels, no travel.
Criteria and weights are published on the event page before registration opens, and they do not change afterwards. They are specific to the event. Code Olympics scored functionality and reliability at 40 per cent, constraint mastery at 30, code quality at 20 and innovation at 10. Judges score on a five-point scale against the published criteria and nothing else.
Each judge reviews their batch independently on a structured form and never sees another judge's scores. A project's final score is the weighted average across the judges who reviewed it, on the published criteria. Every team receives its score together with the written feedback from its judges, placed or not.
A signed evaluation protocol setting out the submissions you reviewed and the scores you gave, a numbered certificate of judging, and your name and affiliation on the event's judges section. The protocol records work that was completed, not an appointment that was accepted.
No. Fellows serve as judges as a matter of course, and Fellowship is its own election with its own criteria and its own vote. The panel is open beyond the Fellowship.
No. Panels are matched to the subject of the event, and that match is the reason a seat exists. If an event is not your discipline, we would rather place you on one that is.
Hackathon Raptors is a Community Interest Company registered in England and Wales, number 15557917, at Office 2131, 182-184 High Street North, East Ham, London E6 2JA. A community interest company is asset-locked and files an annual report on how it served its community. Our Charter and election process are published in full above.