We are running a hackathon with… 🥁 Railway credits for every submission, and up to $1000 in cash prizes for winners!

The best way to showcase Railway is through our community, so we’re calling on you to show us what you got.

Submit your project 👉 here 👈 (note, the form will open when the Hackathon starts, more below).

Timing

The hackathon will start at 8am ET on Wednesday August 6th. Submissions will close 12pm ET on Monday, August 11th. Projects must be created after this date to be eligible.

Everything you need to know to submit and potentially win $$$ below.

Submissions: calling for end-to-end templates & long-form content

Categories

Each hackathon submissions will be evaluated for the below categories. You can win through either:

• Template sophistication: your project and its template solve a novel problem, are highly sophisticated, and incorporate several services together to build an end-to-end application.
• Content depth: the content about your Railway project showcases your work and Railway in depth and is detailed, helpful, and engages the community.

Winners will be evaluated in the depth of their project and/or content by the Railway team, and through community votes at the end of the hackathon.

Bonus: post on social media about your project and the engagement there will give you an extra push in the case of a close call!

How it works

1. Submit your project, template, and content between Aug 6th - Aug 11th in the form here (note, it will open Aug 6th when the Hackathon starts)
2. On Monday, August 11th, we will start a thread on station.railway.com soliciting you to add a comment showcasing your project/content to the community. To upvote, people can emoji react - we will be counting the number of reactions as the number of votes.
3. Voting in Railway’s help station closes on Thursday, August 14th
4. Winners announced (via socials, our changelog, and email) Friday August 15th

Criteria

To be considered for the $25 credit and for a chance to win, make sure your submission follows the below criteria:

• Create a Railway project after the hackathon start date, and don’t make updates to it after the hackathon end date
• Your Railway project is public
• You created a template from your Railway project (optional: publishing it to our template marketplace at railway.com/deploy)
• Create a piece of written content showcasing your new project and mention Railway. This could be a blog, article, step-by-step tutorial, you name it.
• You meet basic criteria for depth in your project (like containing a service) and content (like length)

Perks: $25 credits to everyone, $1k cash prize for 1st place

Anyone who meets the submission criteria will get $25 of Railway credits applied to their workspace.

Then, there will be a set of winners in each category. Each set of winners will receive the same prizes (so, two chances for a $1k prize!).

Prizes, in cash:

• 1st place: $1000
• 2nd place $500
• 3rd place $200

Bonus: after the fact, we will promote the templates and content of the winners across our channels. So make sure to beef up your template for kickback or include your unique referral link in your content for affiliate commission!

Ideas and suggestions

Want a head start with some ideas? Here they are:

• From our community, templates they wish existed
• Where we would like to seed content: dev.to, medium.com, geeksforgeeks.org
• End-to-end templates and topics interesting to us: MLOps, AI/LLM integrations, headless CMS deployments, NextJS/Python/Laravel apps
• Other areas to get started: look at existing popular templates, and combine several for an end-to-end stack to implement and write about

Got questions? Ask away in our Discord community in the #hackathon25 channel. Otherwise, we’re excited to see what you’ve got cooking starting August 6th!