Forem: The DEV Team

Join our DEV Weekend Challenge — $1,000 in Prizes Across TEN winners! Submissions Due April 20 at 6:59 AM UTC.

Jess Lee — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:00:01 +0000

We're excited to kick off another DEV Weekend Challenge, a short bite-sized challenge planned to fit into your weekend. We know the submission window is tight, so we've set the timing to ensure that no matter where you are in the world, you'll have the majority of your Saturday and Sunday to participate.

We’ll select four overall winners and six prize category winners who utilize a specific technology as part of their challenge submission.

Let’s get to it!

Our Prompt

With Earth Day just around the corner, we welcome you to build something inspired by the planet.

Please interpret this prompt however you’d like. Honoring your favorite green spaces? Solving carbon emissions? Reimagining our entire planetary relationship? Any angle is fair game!

Prize Categories

This challenge introduces something new: six prize categories for participants who incorporate a specific technology into their project. You don't need to use any of these tools to be eligible for our overall winner spots but if you're curious about any of the tech, this is a great excuse to give one a try.

Best use of Backboard
Best use of Auth0 for Agents
Best use of Google Gemini
Best use of Snowflake
Best use of GitHub Copilot
Best use of Solana

Pro Tip: since prize category winners are drawn from a smaller pool of submissions, your odds of taking home a prize are meaningfully higher.

Note: You may use multiple technologies in a single submission to qualify for multiple categories, but participants are limited to one win per challenge.

Judging Criteria

All submissions will be judged on the following:

Relevance to Theme: Does the project clearly connect to the challenge theme?
Creativity: Is the concept original or is it an interesting take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Is the project functional, well-built, and easy to use?
Writing Quality: Is the submission post clearly written and engaging?
Use of Prize Category Technology (optional): If pursuing a prize category, does the submission meaningfully incorporate the chosen technology?

Prizes

Ten winners will each take home:

$100 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template below. Your post should give us an overview of the community you built for, what you made, and a demo of your project.

Weekend Challenge Submission Template

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules such as eligibility requirements.

Need Help?

Check out our official challenge page for resources to help you get started with tech from our prize category partners.

Important Dates

Launch Time: April 17, 2026 2:00 AM UTC
Submissions Due: April 20, 2026 6:59 AM UTC

Here's what that looks like across a few timezones:

Timezone	Launch Time (Local)	Submissions Due (Local)
PDT	Thursday, Apr 16 at 7:00 PM	Sunday, Apr 19 at 11:59 PM
EDT	Thursday, Apr 16 at 10:00 PM	Monday, Apr 20 at 2:59 AM
GMT	Friday, Apr 17 at 2:00 AM	Monday, Apr 20 at 6:59 AM
CEST	Friday, Apr 17 at 4:00 AM	Monday, Apr 20 at 8:59 AM
IST	Friday, Apr 17 at 7:30 AM	Monday, Apr 20 at 12:29 PM
JST	Friday, Apr 17 at 11:00 AM	Monday, Apr 20 at 3:59 PM
AEST	Friday, Apr 17 at 12:00 PM	Monday, Apr 20 at 4:59 PM

Winners will be Announced on Thursday, April 30.

Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Good luck!!

Congrats to the 2026 WeCoded Challenge Winners!

Jess Lee — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:34:36 +0000

The results are in! We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2026 WeCoded Challenge.

Over the past few weeks, the community has been buzzing with your personal stories and frontend interpretations of gender equity in tech. We invited you to celebrate underrepresented voices, and the response was nothing short of inspiring. From vulnerable accounts of career pivots to artful depictions of strength through diversity, your contributions have been a joy to review.

Selecting winners from such a meaningful pool of submissions was no easy feat for our judges. Your posts help make the WeCoded celebration more meaningful, but there were a few standouts that we are particularly excited to highlight today.

Let's give a round of applause to our winners!

Congratulations To…

Echoes of Experience Winners

@abarron traces her path in tech back to an Alicia Keys concert, an online message board, and fixing computers over AIM as a teenager. Her story is a testament to the importance of online community, something we here at DEV care a lot about.

WeCoded 2026: Echoes of Experience 💜

Ava Barron

Mar 30

The story of how Alicia Keys accidentally got me a career in tech

#devchallenge #wecoded #dei #career

Comments

8 min read

@it_is_margarita tells the story about three generations of a family (a factory worker, a librarian, and a young reader) all drawn to logic and systems. Their reflection on what equity actually looks like is one of the most thoughtful takes we received.

WeCoded 2026: Echoes of Experience 💜

Margarita

Mar 23

It Wasn't Brave. It Was Just Tuesday.

#wecoded #devchallenge #frontend #caree

Comments

4 min read

@earlgreyhot1701d came to a SheBuilds event on International Women's Day with a detailed exit strategy and a fully scoped brief for a concert history tracker she had built with Claude the night before. The decision to stay didn't just lead to a finished app, but a new understanding of what it means to build.

WeCoded 2026: Echoes of Experience 💜

L. Cordero

Mar 9

I Planned an Exit Strategy. I Stayed the Whole Time.

#devchallenge #wecoded #dei #career

Comments 7

5 min read

Frontend Art: Gender Equity Winners

@anchildress1 designed, wrote, narrated, and produced Carbon Trace: an immersive web experience about growing up in an Appalachian coal town and finding her way into engineering. She voiced it herself (in her native accent), backed it with 685 unit tests and 220 E2E tests, and brought full backend discipline to a frontend art project.

WeCoded 2026: Frontend Art 💜

Ashley Childress

Apr 3

Forged Between Coal and Code

#wecoded #devchallenge #frontend #css

Comments 5

12 min read

@nickwatton built a particle system animation of gender flags in celebration of their trans son. It's personal, it's beautiful, and shared with the hope that others will learn from it and make it their own.

WeCoded 2026: Frontend Art 💜

Nick Watton

Mar 22

Gender Fluid

#wecoded #devchallenge #frontend #css

Comments

1 min read

@commonlayer built an interactive terminal experience where the medium is the message: a genderless 3D face, a monochrome screen, and a path you have to walk yourself. Each command is imbued with meaning to reinforce the idea that we all must make our own path, "not just watch it go by."

WeCoded 2026: Frontend Art 💜

Florent Cleron

Mar 18

Less Heard — A Terminal Sketch on Gender Equity in Tech

#wecoded #frontend #threejs #devchallenge

Comments

2 min read

Our winners will receive a DEV++ Membership and an exclusive DEV badge.

All Participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.

What's Next?

The OpenClaw Challenge is running through April 26 with a $1,200 prize pool across two prompts: build something with OpenClaw, or publish a post that educates and inspires. Six winners total, each taking home $200 and a DEV++ Membership.

Share your OpenClaw experience

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Apr 16

Join the OpenClaw Challenge: $1,200 Prize Pool!

#devchallenge #openclawchallenge #openclaw #ai

Comments 7

4 min read

Thank you to everyone who took the time to write, share, and support one another during this challenge. You make DEV a better place.

See you at the next one!

Join the OpenClaw Challenge: $1,200 Prize Pool!

Jess Lee — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:38:54 +0000

If you've spent any time on the internet, you know OpenClaw has been making waves lately. We recently connected with the organizers of ClawCon Michigan and knew it was time to create a space for DEV to get in on the action!

Running through April 26, the OpenClaw Challenge invites you to share your OpenClaw experience with the community. Whether you've been running your own instance for weeks or you're just getting started, we want to hear about it.

There are two prompts for this challenge and six chances to win.

We hope you give it a try!

Our Prompts

OpenClaw in Action

Your mandate is to build something with OpenClaw and share it with the community.

OpenClaw in Action Submission Template

OpenClaw is endlessly hackable and we want to see what you do with it. Whether you're a developer, founder, healthcare professional, or someone who just figured out how to automate something that used to drive you crazy, we want you to show off your build.

Wealth of Knowledge

Your mandate is to publish a post about OpenClaw that will educate, inspire, or spark curiosity.

Wealth of Knowledge Submission Template

Not sure what to write about? Here are some suggestions:

Tutorial: Walk us through how you built a skill, automated a workflow, or integrated a new service with OpenClaw. The more practical and reproducible, the better.
How-to guide: Break down a specific OpenClaw feature or setup process in a way that helps others get started or go deeper.
Personal essay or opinion piece: Share your experience building with OpenClaw or make a case for something. What does OpenClaw get right that others don't? What has your experience taught you about where personal AI is headed?

Note: If you are primarily showing off a project, please submit to the OpenClaw in Action prompt instead!

Prizes

We'll select three winners for each prompt.

Six prompt winners will each receive:

$200 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Winner Badge

🦞 Bonus for ClawCon Michigan Attendees

Are you attending ClawCon Michigan tonight (April 16)? Participate in this challenge and you'll receive an exclusive ClawCon Michigan DEV badge: our way of celebrating the IRL OpenClaw community that inspired us to craft this challenge.

All Participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

How To Participate

In order to participate, you must publish a DEV post using the submission template associated with each prompt.

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules such as eligibility requirements.

Important Dates

April 16: OpenClaw Writing Challenge begins!
April 26: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
May 7: Winners Announced

We can't wait to read what you write. Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Good luck and happy clawing! 🦞

Welcome Thread - v373

Sloan the DEV Moderator — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Leave a comment below to introduce yourself! You can talk about what brought you here, what you're learning, or just a fun fact about
yourself.
Reply to someone's comment, either with a question or just a hello. 👋

Come back next week to greet our new members so you can one day earn our Warm Welcome Badge!

What was your win this week??

Jess Lee — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋

Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?

All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Finally getting your inbox to zero 📧

Happy Friday!

Winner Announcement Delayed for the Notion MCP Challenge

Jess Lee — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:44:10 +0000

Hey all, we have a quick update for everyone who participated in the Notion MCP Challenge.

We were blown away by the quality of submissions and did not expect such competition. As a result, we need a bit more time to carefully review everything and make our final decisions.

This is a direct quote from the Notion team:

"wow, these options look fire"

We'll be back with the winner announcement by the end of next week. Thank you so much for your patience, and for putting so much effort into your builds.

In the meantime, you should get silly with our April Fool's Challenge:

Build software that is intentionally useless

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Apr 1

Join our April Fools Challenge for a chance at TEA-RRIFIC prizes!!!

#jokes #devchallenge #418challenge

330

Comments 84

3 min read

Welcome Thread - v372

Sloan the DEV Moderator — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Leave a comment below to introduce yourself! You can talk about what brought you here, what you're learning, or just a fun fact about
yourself.
Reply to someone's comment, either with a question or just a hello. 👋

Come back next week to greet our new members so you can one day earn our Warm Welcome Badge!

What do you want to know about hardware acceleration? Ask the Google team!

Jess Lee — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:00:45 +0000

Each week, we collect community questions for the team at Google to answer on their weekly livestream, Google Cloud Live.

The next stream is all about accelerating data science and analytics with GPUs. @greggyb will be joined by special guests Jeff Nelson (Google) and William Hill (NVIDIA) for a live speed benchmark (a 340-million-row data scan 🤯) and a discussion on why "expensive" hardware can often be cheaper in the long run.

Stream Details

📅 When: April 7 at 9am PDT / 12pm EDT
📺 Where:
- We'll be simulcasting this livestream right on the DEV homepage! Subscribe or Get Notified on YouTube

Drop your questions in the comments below. What hardware questions do you have? Are you facing any challenges processing your datasets? They'll answer as many questions as they can during the livestream.

What was your win this week?

Jess Lee — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋

Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?

All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Taking a walk without checking your phone 🌳

Happy Friday!

Join our April Fools Challenge for a chance at TEA-RRIFIC prizes!!!

Jess Lee — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:32:19 +0000

Hello, and let’s get this out of the way right now: this is no joke!!

Tired of building world-changing, hyper-optimized production apps? Sick of reading about clean architecture, scalability, and practicality for a moment? Then we have the perfect challenge for you! It’s time to lean into the chaos of the internet: Welcome to the DEV April Fools Challenge. 🦄

Our Prompt: HTCPCP IYKYK

Your mandate for this challenge is to build something completely useless or silly. We want software that solves zero real-world problems. A CSS-only site that un-centers divs? Great. A volume slider that requires you to shake your phone to turn up the music? Awesome. Your only goal is to make us laugh, scratch our heads, or ask Why on earth did they build this? Make a fool of yourself and have fun with it!

Additional Prize Categories:

Best Google AI Usage: Tell us how you leveraged Google AI for this submission. Did you build with Antigravity, experiment in Google AI Studio, or use the Gemini CLI? Or is there a Google AI product embedded in your build such as the Gemini API or any Google Cloud product such as Cloud Run? Tell us all about your experience!
Best Ode to Larry Masinter: We’re talking teapots and intentional 418s.
Community Favorite: Awarded to one of the most popular submissions based on comments, reactions, overall quality, and final judge discretion.

Judging Criteria and Prizes

All submissions will be judged on the following:

Anti-Value Proposition: How delightfully useless, silly, or over-engineered is this project?
Creativity: Is the concept original or a hilariously bad take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Ironically, building bad software sometimes takes good engineering. Is it functional in its dysfunction?
Writing Quality: Is the submission post clear, and does it tell a funny, compelling story about your project?

Prizes

We’ll select two winners for the overall prompt, and one winner for each additional prize category. Our five total winners will each receive:

A surprise teapot or coffee maker with appropriate fixings (approx. $50 USD value)
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template below. Your post should give us an overview of what you built and a demo of your project.

April Fools Challenge Submission Template

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules such as eligibility requirements.

Important Dates

April 1: April Fools Challenge begins!
April 12 at 11:59pm PT: Submissions Due
April 23: Winners Announced

We can’t wait to see what crazy projects you come up with. Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Good luck!!

Forem: The DEV Team

Join our DEV Weekend Challenge — $1,000 in Prizes Across TEN winners! Submissions Due April 20 at 6:59 AM UTC.

Our Prompt

Prize Categories

Judging Criteria

Prizes

How To Participate

Need Help?

Important Dates

Congrats to the 2026 WeCoded Challenge Winners!

Congratulations To…

Echoes of Experience Winners

Frontend Art: Gender Equity Winners

What's Next?

Join the OpenClaw Challenge: $1,200 Prize Pool!

Our Prompts

OpenClaw in Action

Wealth of Knowledge

Prizes

🦞 Bonus for ClawCon Michigan Attendees

How To Participate

Important Dates

Welcome Thread - v373

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

What was your win this week??

Winner Announcement Delayed for the Notion MCP Challenge

Welcome Thread - v372

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

What do you want to know about hardware acceleration? Ask the Google team!

Stream Details

What was your win this week?

Join our April Fools Challenge for a chance at TEA-RRIFIC prizes!!!

Our Prompt: HTCPCP IYKYK

Additional Prize Categories:

Judging Criteria and Prizes

Prizes

How To Participate

Important Dates