About two months ago, we launched the Shipaton Blogging Contest as an official build-in-public partner for Shipaton 2026. Running alongside the hackathon, our contest was designed to reward developers willing to document the work behind building useful apps. Because, as we're all well aware, there's a lot more to building an app than writing code and hitting publish. There are the countless product decisions, technical challenges, experiments, setbacks, and occasional breakthroughs that make up the journey from idea to finished product.
With that in mind, we invited Shipaton participants to take us along on their journey: build, document, and share their experiences with the HackerNoon community for a chance to win from an additional $2,500 in cash prizes.
The responses did not disappoint!
Over the contest's short two-month run, we received over 150 entries from builders who strapped us in and took us along for the ride, from early-stage ideas and technical implementations to product pivots, launch experiences, and lessons learned along the way.
Of course, our blogging contest was just one part of a much bigger undertaking. Shipaton 2026 has since closed its doors to submissions, and the numbers speak for themselves (quite loudly, if you ask us). Over 28,000 participants registered for the hackathon on Devpost, while the official app showcase features more than 2,600 new apps from this year's edition alone.
And while Shipaton was ultimately about getting real apps into the hands of real users, our little corner of the competition was about giving the stories behind those apps a platform of their own.
To everyone who took time out of an already demanding development schedule to document their journey and give the rest of the community something to learn from, thank you for making the inaugural Shipaton Blogging Contest a success. We hope you'll continue sharing your experiences on HackerNoon long after the contest.
Now, on to our results!
Shipaton Blogging Contest Finalists!
As we made clear when we launched the contest, we weren't necessarily looking for the most successful apps. A well-documented mistake, an intelligent pivot, or a technical breakthrough could make for an equally compelling story.
With that in mind, we reviewed the submissions and narrowed the field down to 10 finalists. Let’s meet them!
In no particular order:
- My Safety Checks Were Monuments to Bugs I Had Already Fixed — Ushio Hoshino
- Building Buildhorn for Shipaton 2026: Week Two Progress — Darryl Bayliss
- I'm Building Book of Me, a Journal That Won’t Let You Rewrite the Past — Muhammad Abdullah
- Building Isolyne (Part 3): Testing State Supersession and Idempotent Replay in a CQRS Event Engine — Amit Kumar Gupta
Congratulations to all our finalists! Your stories were a reminder of just how much goes into building something from scratch, and we hope to see more of your work on HackerNoon.
But, of course, there can only be three winners.
After some deliberation, we've selected the three stories that stood out to us the most for their quality, technical substance, and the insights they offered into the process of building in public.
Shipaton Blogging Contest Winners!
Without further ado, let's meet the writers taking home the $2,500 #Shipaton Blogging Contest prize pool!
1st Place
Akif takes readers inside the making of Qalaris, an iPad app that simulates a flat-cut reed pen using Apple Pencil data. The story combines interaction design, rendering experiments, multimodal AI feedback, and server-side RevenueCat credit accounting.
Congratulations @Akif 🎉, you’ve won $1,200!
2nd Place
https://hackernoon.com/my-safety-checks-were-monuments-to-bugs-i-had-already-fixed?embedable=true
Ushio Hoshino traces six seemingly unrelated bugs back to one architectural mistake: writing checks that memorialized previous incidents instead of protecting system-wide properties. Through real code and successive failures, the story shows how reachability tests, state variation, and time-aware verification produced stronger safeguards.
Congratulations @ushio-hoshino 🎉, you’ve won $800!
3rd Place
https://hackernoon.com/building-buildhorn-for-shipaton-2026-week-two-progress?embedable=true
Darryl Bayliss documents Buildhorn’s evolution into a working CI-monitoring app built with Kotlin Multiplatform, SwiftUI, Firebase, GitHub Apps, and Firestore. Beyond reporting progress, the story explains key architectural choices around shared business logic, native interfaces, authentication, webhook processing, duplicate-event handling, and subscription plans.
Congratulations @darrylbayliss 🎉, you’ve won $500!
Congratulations once more to our winners! And another big thank you to everyone who participated, as well as the RevenueCat team for making this contest possible.
We can't wait to see what you build next!
How to Claim Your #Shipaton Blogging Contest Prize
- Contact asher@hackernoon.com and yes-reply@hackernoon.com with the email linked to your HackerNoon account.
- We will validate your claim and share a form requesting your details for reward distribution.
- You will receive your winnings within 1-3 weeks after completing the form.
Please note that you must contact us within 60 days after the winners’ announcement date.