3 min readUpdated Dec 1, 2023

Announcing the winners of the Ably Realtime Hackathon

Announcing the winners of the Ably Realtime Hackathon
Beth LoftBeth Loft


The Ably Realtime Experiences Hackathon winning projects announcement is here!

Participants were challenged to build either a realtime dashboard or collaboration experience using the Ably APIs, with a bonus category for projects built with React ecosystem tools.

Over 700 participants signed up and over 50 submissions were received which you can now view in the project gallery. A huge thank you to all those who submitted projects. It was great to see Ably used in such a wide range of applications - everything from a multilingual chat app to collaborative science experiments! The volume and quality of entries made our judge’s task very difficult, but we are delighted to announce the winning projects!:

Collaboration Experiences

This category challenged participants to demonstrate the benefits of collaborating in realtime using Ably’s capabilities (including our new Spaces product).

Judging explored the usefulness of the application, the use of Ably collaboration features, and the overall functionality.

Judged by:

“It was great to see such diversity from the Hackathon submissions, all finding innovative ways to use collaborative features to really enhance the user experience - from educational apps, to community groups and project management tools." - Faye McClenahan

And the winners are …

Realtime Dashboards

This category was focused on using Ably to demonstrate innovative realtime information displays and dashboards.

Judges explored the usefulness, data source, and data visualization of the application.

Judged by:

“It’s inspiring to see the new and inventive ways these submissions are using Ably’s products in this category. Some enhanced existing experiences, making them more compelling with realtime features, while others found totally new applications with realtime collaboration at their core. The entrants’ creativity, and benefits of realtime data were clear to see.” - Tim Buntel

And the winners are …

React bonus category

We challenged participants to build their application using Ably's React SDK and other React ecosystem tools such as Next.js to be eligible for a challenge bonus prize.

Judged by:

“To see our newly created react hooks for channels and spaces get used a lot in the hackathon was fantastic, the quality of submissions was impressive and we're looking forward to receiving more feedback as more and more people take advantage of them" - Stephane Moreau

And the winners are …

Want to see all the hackathon submissions?

These winning submissions, and all of the entries, included in the project gallery are great examples of what you can do using Ably. We will be sharing more entries on our blog and social channels in the coming weeks - so stay tuned on X (Twitter), LinkedIn and Discord.

And if you've been inspired to build something with Ably yourself, you can sign up for free and get:

  • 6M Monthly messages
  • 200 Peak concurrent channels
  • 200 Peak concurrent connections

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