It happened again!!
I'm proud to say that 'Team Sitecorepunk 2077' (...it's still just me) has officially won the 2026 Sitecore Hackathon! 🏆
That's now two years in a row! It's really an unreal feeling.
A day or two after the event, I sifted through the SitecoreHackathon GitHub to pull some stats: 34 teams registered, 20 teams submitted something before the deadline.
I vibed together a submission showcase to digest all of this year's entries.
Check it out here: Sitecore Hackathon 2026 Submission Showcase.
👟 Preparation
In my hackathon prep post, I basically said 'you can practice for this'. Taking my own advice, I spent time leading up to the event building a couple of basic Marketplace applications locally using AI-assisted tools like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, VS Code, and Perplexity.
After a few days into this deep dive, I wound up with a pretty solid LLM-friendly knowledge base containing relevant public Sitecore Marketplace SDK/Blok documentation, examples, and code samples to give my agents the context they need to successfully build and iterate on a Marketplace app. With these technical barriers eliminated, I could focus on building features for whatever app I'd end up building during the event.
Day of, I'd say I felt...pretty well prepared actually. It wasn't my first rodeo, so I knew what to expect. My workspace was ready, and I felt confident that I had the tools to execute whatever the categories/idea requirements.
I took the afternoon off from work and forced a short nap, enough time to reset, and have dinner with the family.
I had my calendar blocked. Everyone at home knew that I'd be upstairs, locked away in my office for the next 24 hours (with the occasional break in between).
I even had my Hackerspace Hero shirt on!
It was time.
