DOGFOOD ran online for 72 hours, from 26 to 29 September 2026, and gave every team the same brief: build the self-hosted submission and judging platform that would then be used to judge them. Each entry had to start from a single docker compose up with the network off, climb a published four-tier ladder checked by an acceptance suite, and defend in writing how it turns judges' marks into a ranking. 194 projects were scored by 37 human judges and five AI judges, each judge counting as one equal vote, with an adjustment for judges who mark high or low across the board. Every score, rank range and public note is on the DOGFOOD results page.
Four articles about the build shared the write-up award equally, ranked blind to the author:
Every project was scored from 0 to 5 on four criteria: Tier Completion and Correctness (40%), Judging Integrity (25%), Adoptability and Operability (20%), and Code Quality and Innovation (15%). The panel was headed by:
Seven green checks and a team page that named its judges, I built a hackathon judging app and it was too confident, I built a hackathon judging platform, and the test data had no winner in it, Every hackathon leaderboard is more confident than its judges. Mine admits it., 2% bias, 98% noise: what I built, and cut, for a hackathon judging engine, 7/7 PASS: The Bugs My Acceptance Checker Could Never See, My judging engine passed 119 tests and had never once finished its own maths, I wrote a justification in my docs, then tested it. It was mostly wrong., Three Judges Scored the Same Project Twice. They Disagreed With Themselves by 1.11 Points., Normalizing 30 Judges Without Lying About It: the maths, a counterintuitive k, and what I chose not to build, The judges agreed no better than chance: 4 lessons from building a hackathon judging platform, A Missing Score Is Not a Neutral Score: Three Ways Our Hackathon Judging Maths Broke, Rankings with receipts: what building a hackathon judging platform taught us, I Built the Platform That Judges Hackathons in 72 Hours. The Hardest Bugs Were About Evidence, Not Features., One judge gave everything a 4: building a hackathon judging portal that survives its own data, Building the Platform That Would Judge Us, One SQL Update Reopened a Closed Hackathon. The Checker Still Exited 0., The database says no · Dog-Food write-up, BeyondBug: The Score That Moved, the Boundary That Held, I Built the Platform That Will Judge Me: Z-Scores, Judge Islands, and a Dataset Where Nobody Agrees, Same score, 23 places apart: the normalization maths behind a hackathon judging platform, Building Forgeboard for DOGFOOD 2026: a hackathon judging platform that refuses to fake confidence, Building DOGFOOD: We Thought We Were Building a Hackathon Judging Platform. We Were Actually Building a System to Prove It Could Be Trusted., The scoring bugs we almost shipped in a hackathon judging platform, Your database is not an audit log: 72 hours of verifiable hackathon judging, Building a hackathon judging platform? Here's what broke in mine, step by step, First Place Was a Coin Flip — So I Built a Judging Engine That Could Prove It ← Best overall, The Scoring Bug We Caught Before We Shipped It, How Not To Rank a Hackathon, We Built a Hackathon Platform Where Every Rule Lives at the Layer That Can't Be Bypassed, OmniJudge Post-Mortem: 1-ULP Drift, Prisma Traps, and Alpine musl, I Built a Hackathon Judging Platform in 72 Hours. Here’s What Actually Went Wrong, Offline Self-Hostable Hackathon Portal with MERN and Docker | DOGFOOD 2026 Writeup, Building PrismJudge: An Offline-First, Mathematically Rigorous Hackathon Platform, CRUD Was the Easy Part: What I Learned Building a Self-Hosted Judging System, Building SkillForge: A Reproducible and Auditable Hackathon Judging System, Seven Checks, Three Real Bugs: Building a Hackathon Platform for the Thing That Judges You, TrustForge: A Hackathon Judging System That Shows Its Work, How Three Developers Built One Monolith Without Git Merge Hell, Building Broadsheet: a hackathon platform in FastAPI, Postgres and Docker, I Replaced the Database With a JSON File to Build the Platform That Will Judge Me, We Thought Hackathon Judging Was Just About Scores. We Were Wrong., I Built a Hackathon Platform with Python, SQLite, and Zero Runtime Dependencies, We Thought We Were Building a Hackathon Website, We built a hackathon judging platform because we were tired of spreadsheets, GitHub - jaiswal-aaditya/JuryStack | Aaditya Jaiswal, I Built a Hackathon Platform Before I Knew What Docker Was, CodeArena: Building the Platform That Would Judge Us, Building Juryza: Hackathon Judging You Can Defend, We Built the Platform That Would Judge Us, I Built a Hackathon Platform Because I Was Tired of Hackathons Breaking in the Same Places, Building HackArena: The Things We Didn't Expect to Be Hard, I Built a Hackathon Platform. The Hard Part Was Making Judging Trustworthy., The Hackathon Won, Building Raptor: A Hackathon Judging Platform That Checks Its Own Homework, I Built VERDICT: A Hackathon Portal That Shows Its Work, Project Write-Up: DOGFOOD, JUDGELAYER: Building a Hackathon Judging Platform You Can Actually Trust, Trust the Result: Building ForgeJudge in 72 Hours, DOGFOOD 2026 - Hackathon Platform dogfood. blog, Introducing Consensus — Hackathon Platform, Reimagined, Introducing Consensus — Hackathon Management, Reimagined, DogFoodHackathon2k26
