Speed Demon | 72-Hour Hackathon

About the hackathon

About the Hackathon Speed Demon is a 72-hour online performance championship built around one challenge: make your code faster, leaner, and more efficient. Most hackathons ask a panel whether they liked your idea. Speed Demon measures whether your code actually performs. Every track provides a task specification, a dataset, and a deliberately naive reference implementation that solves the problem correctly and slowly. Your challenge is to solve the same problem correctly — and not slowly. The competition covers five tracks: log processing, search indexing, complex CSV parsing and joining, graph algorithms, and lossless compression. Each track tests a different aspect of performance engineering, from memory layout and parsing efficiency to shortest-path algorithms and compression trade-offs. This is not a hackathon where you submit benchmark numbers from your own laptop. We run your code ourselves. Every submission is built from your Dockerfile and executed on the same dedicated machine in Helsinki, with fixed CPU resources, memory limits, and a controlled benchmarking environment. Your output must match the reference implementation exactly, byte for byte, or you receive no score for that track. The competition uses a published efficiency coefficient that combines execution time, peak memory, source size, dependency weight, and scaling behaviour. Machine-measured pe…

Tracks & themes

What this event is looking for. Tap a track to see every hackathon tagged with it.

Timeline

1. Registration closes

   Fri, 30 October 2026

   4 days left

2. Hacking begins

   Thu, 29 October 2026

3. Submissions close

   Sat, 31 October 2026

Prizes & benefits

• Certificates

Eligibility & rules

Organizer

Official links

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