We recently teamed up with MiduDev, one of the most popular Spanish-speaking tech YouTubers, to host a community hackathon. Over 150 projects were submitted, each showing off how developers are building with Clerk in creative and meaningful ways.

After careful review, five projects stood out and took home the top prizes. This article is a breakdown of how each app was judged, but more importantly an examination of each app that was built based on the choices of each developer which lead to their success.

How projects were judged

While all submissions were evaluated across a variety of dimensions, the scoring emphasized three main criteria:

• Creativity – Was the idea unique, unexpected, or imaginative?
• Clerk Integration – Was Clerk used in a meaningful and intentional way?
• User Experience (UX) – Was the final product polished, intuitive, and a joy to use?

The top 5 finalists nailed all three. Not only was the idea thought out and executed well, they felt cohesive and genuinely useful. Let’s take a look at what made them stand out.

1st Place: Key Leap

Key Leap was a clear standout because it reimagined what authentication can be. It used Clerk beyond just the drop-in sign-up and sign-in components but used it as the core mechanic of an interactive game.

Players progress by meeting access-level challenges, essentially playing with Clerk’s permission model. The experience is deceptively simple but technically deep, making it a brilliant blend of creativity, Clerk integration, and UX.

2nd Place: Finanzz

Finanzz is a mobile-first finance management web application. It uses AI to simplify various processes such as logging expenses using voice and image recognition, automatic transaction categorization, and even learns over time to help the user make better financial decisions.

The developer used Clerk to quickly create a great login experience for users of Finanzz so they could focus on the core logic of the application.

3rd Place: SnippetLab

SnippetLab impressed with its developer-first mindset. It’s a code snippet manager with both a web UI and a powerful CLI for fetching saved snippets. Various social media features have also been integrated such as liking, sharing, and commenting on snippets.

The developer took advantage of Clerk Elements to design authentication forms that matched the theme of the rest of the app while still leveraging our secure user management platform.

4th Place: Atomox

Atomox is a community-driven platform for creating and sharing visual web UI components. Developers can browse components, interact with them directly in the browser, and view the source code that powers each one. Its visual polish and thoughtful UX are only a few elements that made it stand out.

Behind the scenes, Clerk handles user authentication and profile management, giving the app a solid foundation for growing a creative community.

5th Place: SoulsPixel

SoulsPixel is a collaborative pixel board enhanced with gamification. Users place pixels on the board to earn achievements, unlock special features, and earn their place on the leaderboard. On top of that, the history of the board can be replayed to see where each pixel was placed over time.

Clerk powers user identity, allowing users to sign-in using Google or GitHub while requiring unique usernames to power the activity feed within the app.

Conclusion

This hackathon was definitely a showcase of technical skills, but also a celebration of creativity, craft, and community. Every winning project demonstrates that no matter how technical or creative an application is, Clerk is a great choice to seamlessly integrate user management into any application.

We’re grateful to MiduDev for helping bring this event to life, and even more thankful to everyone who submitted a project!