Student Hacker Report

Most of the projects entered by our sample of student hackers include front-end web or mobile development and our language rankings reflect this. With only 24–48 hours at most hackathons, student lean toward API driven web & mobile projects.

It’s a little surprising to see Android place so solidly ahead of iOS, but the free-to-publish model gives it an edge with students working on weekend hacks.⁶

Although it’s the basis for many inside jokes within the student community, the rankings show that Node.js was extremely popular during the 2014–2015 academic year. (But we still can’t endorse it as ‘the only real dev language’)

CSS, Objective-C, Swift, and Lua rank relatively high on Devpost, given their use in web, iOS, and game development, respectively. Languages such as C++, R, Perl, and Scala, are more common in enterprise, back-end applications, and data/statistical analysis, all of which are less common at hackathons and in student projects.⁷

Hardware was hugely popular in 2014–2015 among hackers and judges. 10% of prize winning projects were tagged “hardware,” 8.2% Arduino, 5.3% Pebble, 4.8% Leap Motion, 4.5% Myo, and 3.9% Oculus. Each of these hardware tags showed up in a higher percentage of winning hacks than non-winning hacks.

During the spring semester, Pebble, Oculus, Leap Motion, Intel Edison, Raspberry Pi, Muse, and Meta grew in popularity, likely due to company sponsorship.

Despite the recent explosion of interest in NoSQL data stores (e.g. MongoDB & Redis), relational databases remain quite popular.

The Paas/IaaS space is increasingly competitive, and hackers have more options than ever when it comes to devops. Since the XaaS model tends toward commoditization, both leaders & new entrants will need to offer more personalized support to differentiate themselves.

Tags that saw big growth in the second half of the academic year included Unity, Intel Edison, Bootstrap, Meteor.js, Flask, OpenCV, Jade, DigitalOcean, Ionic, Wolfram Technologies, Linode, Postmates, Capital One, Blender, Swift, and SQLite.

The impact of hackathon sponsorship is clear: if you show up and participate, hackers will use your technology. We looked at the 20 companies that sponsored two or more student hackathons in 2014 and had 50 or more overall projects tagged with their technologies. 19 of those companies had a higher prevalence of tags when they sponsored, including 11 that were tagged more than twice as often when they sponsored. Sponsorship had impact for companies tagged less overall, and for companies with massive penetration and mindshare.

Hackers also expressed their sense of humor through tags. Love was tagged consistently throughout the year, but we’re unsure how much of that was love and how much was LÖVE, the 2d game engine. Coffee and Red Bull were dead even, but pizza beat out guacamole. There was more blood and sweat in the Spring than in the Fall, but tears were steady throughout the academic year.

Sponsor hackathons, but don’t just write a check. It’s more effective to send developer evangelists who can work on-site with hackers.

Promote your tag gallery on Devpost. All of the tags above link to a corresponding project gallery. Encourage hackers to feature their projects there and engage with your community.

Organize your own hackathon focused on your technology and post the event and submissions on Devpost. We’ll tell our entire community about it & it’s free.

Run a 3–4 month online hackathon with us open to developers around the world. The extended timeframe will lead to more diverse and more polished projects using your technology.