48-hour hackathons EST. MMXV
How the weekend works

The format.

A MOITUS event is a 48-hour open hackathon: Friday-evening kickoff to Sunday-evening pitches. Below is the exact playbook — the timeline, the rules, the judging matrix, and what it takes to host one.

✓ OPEN TO EVERYONE

No experience gate. No invitation.

Developers, designers, product people and complete first-timers are all welcome. You don’t need a team, a company, or a track record — but you do need one thing: a genuine passion for building software. MOITUS is a working build weekend, not a place to simply spend a Saturday. You come with an idea or the skills to join one, and you come to ship. Teams form on the night at the Pitch Fire, and mentors from the partner engineering teams are on the floor all weekend to unblock you.

Come with an idea

Pitch it in 60 seconds and recruit the talent you need on the spot.

Come with skills

Backend, frontend, design, hardware — join a pitch that needs you.

The 48-hour timeline

Friday kickoff to Sunday pitches.

Friday — Kickoff & Team Formation

18:00–19:00 Registration, networking, and a technical briefing on the available APIs and datasets.
19:00–20:30 The Pitch Fire — 60 seconds at the mic to pitch what you want to build and the talent you need (“I need a backend Python dev and a UI designer”).
20:30–22:00 Organic team formation over food. Hacking officially begins.

Saturday — Deep Code & Mentorship

09:00 Breakfast served.
11:00–16:00 Mentor rounds — senior sponsor engineers walk floor-to-floor, checking repos, troubleshooting API endpoints and reviewing database schemas.
23:30 Quiet hours begin (servers and coding continue through the night).

Sunday — Submission & Judgment

12:00 Code freeze. All code pushed to a public GitHub / GitLab repo; teams submit a brief stack write-up.
14:00–16:30 Live demos. Strictly no slides — show the app running locally or on a staging server.
17:00 Winners announced and closing ceremony.
The rules

Six things you agree to when you register.

01

Open to everyone

No experience gate and no invitation required. Developers, designers, product people and first-timers are all welcome. Teams form on the night at the Pitch Fire — come with an idea or come to join one.

02

Any stack, any language

Use whatever ships fastest — web, mobile, hardware, notebooks. Third-party libraries and the sponsor APIs are encouraged. The only constraint is time.

03

Build in the open

At the Sunday code freeze, all code must be pushed to a public GitHub or GitLab repository, with a short write-up of your stack. If the judges can’t see it, it didn’t happen.

04

No slides. Working tech only.

Demos are strictly live — show the app running locally or on a staging server. A polished deck over hardcoded mock data does not win.

05

Build it this weekend

Bring skills and ideas, not a half-finished project. Everything you demo should be built during the 48-hour window. Pre-existing open-source components are fine when disclosed.

06

Respect the sandboxes

The pre-release and partner APIs come under sandbox terms. Stay within the rate limits and usage terms you’re briefed on — abusing a partner endpoint ends your run.

Scoring

The 20-point judging matrix.

Panels score every demo on the same four criteria — five points each — to keep evaluation objective. Live on stage, strictly no slides.

Technical Complexity

5 pts

Difficult, clean code integrating multiple complex APIs — not a simple frontend wrapper.

Working Execution

5 pts

Does the app actually work during the live demo, or is it heavily hardcoded with fake mock data?

Design & Intuition

5 pts

Is the UX fluid? Can a normal user understand the tool within ten seconds of opening it?

Market / Civic Impact

5 pts

Does it solve a real-world problem effectively, and is it viable for scaling beyond a weekend prototype?

The operational blueprint

Hosting one? Here’s what your venue needs.

To reproduce a TechHub-style weekend, your ops team must provide three things without compromise.

  1. 01

    High-density Wi-Fi infrastructure

    A dedicated network that handles 150+ developers concurrently uploading data, running heavy installs and making high-volume API requests without dropping.

  2. 02

    API playbooks

    Documented SDKs and sandbox environments delivered to participants at least 48 hours before kickoff, so nobody burns the first night reading basic syntax docs.

  3. 03

    Dedicated dev mentors

    Roughly one technical mentor for every 8–10 teams, to unblock pipeline issues immediately.

Judged by people who read repos for a living.

Meet the four judges behind the matrix.

Meet the judges →