Hey DEV community!

We are thrilled to announce our latest challenge on DEV in partnership with our friends at MongoDB and special co-sponsor Google Cloud: the MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022!

Announcing the MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022 on DEV 🎉

If you’re familiar with our hackathons here on DEV, you know that the community has a lot of fun with them and gets pretty creative with what they build. Whether you’ve joined us in the past or not, we hope you’ll throw your hat into the ring by participating in the MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022 on DEV!

From now through December 8th, MongoDB is offering you the chance to use your ingenuity and creativity to build an application using MongoDB's cloud based developer data platform, MongoDB Atlas. In addition to getting the chance to participate in a community event, show off your skills, and learn something new, anyone who submits a valid project (including an official submission post, published on DEV) will be automatically entered to win a variety of amazing prizes (including up to $1,000 USD).

All About MongoDB

If you've been a member of the DEV community for a while, you've likely encountered articles by the talented team over at MongoDB (many members of their team have been using DEV for years).

You’re likely already familiar with MongoDB, the wildly popular and open source document database. But have you explored MongoDB Atlas? It’s more than a database, it’s a full developer data platform offering built-in data services for full-text search, analytics, data visualizations, edge-to-cloud sync and more.

This hackathon is the perfect opportunity to build your own application around these use cases without the added complexity of additional tools. MongoDB believes that working with data doesn't need to be hard, and they’ve built an intuitive developer experience to help you get building. We’re excited to partner up for this MongoDB Atlas hackathon and can’t wait to see what you create. Read on for full details.

How to Participate in the MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022 on DEV

MongoDB has a generous forever free tier –no credit card required–, so you can go ahead and get started building your application without worrying about purchasing credits.

1. Register your attendance and create a MongoDB Atlas account using this registration page, or sign-in if you have an existing account.

2. Create an app using MongoDB Atlas –the cloud offering by MongoDB– that falls under one of the categories below.

3. Code must be made publicly available on GitHub.

4. Code must be licensed with a permissive license (MIT, Apache-2, etc).

5. Publish overview of the app on DEV between November 8 and December 8 using this submission template.

6. Provide the app’s demo URL, relevant screenshots, description, etc.

Project Categories

The MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022 on DEV is calling for projects in the following five categories:

• Search No More: Build an application with full-text search capabilities using MongoDB Atlas and Atlas Search

Guidance: MongoDB Atlas offers integrated capabilities for full-text search that allows you to easily create search indexes and queries for your data - directly in the Atlas UI. For this category, be sure to enable Atlas Search and avoid using basic operators like $text or $regex.

(Sample use-cases: E-commerce search engine for product catalog, movie catalog with fuzzy searching and autocomplete.)

• About Real-time Build a front-end application using MongoDB Atlas and change streams to display live updates as your database changes.

Guidance: Change streams in MongoDB Atlas allow applications to access real-time data changes without the complexity and risk of tailing the oplog. Applications can use change streams to subscribe to all data changes on a single collection, a database, or an entire deployment, and immediately react to them. See the article on change streams in JavaScript for inspiration.

(Sample use-cases: Stock market ticker, chat application, dashboard for IoT sensor.)

• Think Outside the JS Box Build an application using MongoDB Atlas with any language that is not JavaScript. You can use the FARM stack with Python, Quarkus and Java, PHP, or any other language of your choice that is supported by MongoDB’s native drivers.

Guidance: MongoDB has native drivers in more than 12 languages. While MEAN and MERN are often thought of as the de facto standards, MongoDB provides the flexibility to work with virtually any stack of your choice.

(Sample use-cases: As simple as a TODO application or as wild as your imagination can get!)

• Google Cloud Superstar Build a modern application with MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud

Guidance: Use your favorite Google Cloud APIs with MongoDB Atlas to build a highly-scalable modern application. You can open a Google Cloud account and get $300 in free credits. Check out the Cloud APIs page for ideas!

(Sample use-cases: Analyze text sentiment with Google Cloud Natural Language API and Atlas App Services, build and deploy a serverless application with Google Cloud Run and MongoDB Atlas, build a machine learning prediction model with Google BigQuery for your Atlas data.)

• Choose Your Own Adventure: Create an application using MongoDB Atlas that doesn’t fit into any of the categories above. The more creative and wacky, the better. Not sure what to build? Load up some sample data, and get started right away.

(Note: the winners we select in this category will be the ones that got super creative and wacky! Feel free to go as random as possible.)

💰 Prizes 💰

Five Grand Prize Winners (one per category):

• $1,000 USD gift card or equivalent
• $300 USD credit to the Forem Shop
• MongoDB Grand Prize swag package
• $50 in Atlas credits
• DEV Sticker Pack
• DEV “MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022” Grand Prize profile badge

Runner-Up Prizes (10 Total – across all categories):

• $500 USD gift card or equivalent
• $150 USD credit to the Forem Shop
• MongoDB Runner-Up swag package
• $50 in Atlas credits
• DEV Sticker Pack
• DEV “MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022” Runner-Up profile badge

Participants (with a valid project):

• DEV Sticker Pack
• DEV “MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022” participant profile badge

Cost of shipping included. If shipping outside of the U.S., international customs and duties may apply. Please research your local import laws for more information on customs fees or reach out to shop@forem.com with any questions.

Additional Notes and Rules:

• We encourage you to share update posts on DEV using the #atlashackathon22 tag to keep us posted on your progress (hint: use series: [“series name”] in the markdown heading of all your MongoDB Atlas Hackathon-related posts to link all content in a series)
• Multiple submissions are allowed, but an entrant (whether an individual, team or entity) may only win once in a particular contest.
• If you collaborate with anyone, please list their DEV handles in your submission post so we can award a profile badge to your entire team! DEV does not handle prize-splitting, so in the event your project is named a Grand Prize-winner or runner-up, you will need to split those amongst yourselves. Thank you for understanding!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to 18+. Contest entry period ends December 8th 2022, 11:59 PM UTC. Contest is void where prohibited or restricted by law or regulation. All entries must be new projects and created during the hackathon period. For Official Rules, see Contest Announcement Page and General Contest Official Rules.

Community Support

To ask any questions about MongoDB or about the rules of this contest, leave a comment in the MongoDB Atlas Hackathon 2022 help thread. Our team will be monitoring this space to answer your questions in collaboration with the MongoDB team. You can also hop into the MongoDB Official Community here.

Need some external motivation and guidance? Who doesn’t! We encourage all participants to swing by our community discussion thread where you can share your ideas and get suggestions on improvements from the DEV community as you build your app. You can also use the discussion thread to share your progress along the way to get support from others.

🎥 Also, the MongoDB team conducted a live stream on November 11th! You can watch the recording here on YouTube! 🎥

Important Dates 🗓

• November 8th, 2022: Hackathon Begins
• December 8th, 2022: Hackathon Submission Due at 11:59 PM UTC
• December 9th, 2022: Submission judging begins

Winners will be selected and announced within three weeks of the final submission deadline.

We’re so excited for you to join us for this brand new hackathon with our friends at MongoDB. Have fun, learn lots, and keep us posted along the way.

Good luck and happy coding! 🍀