Celebrating the Successful TiDB Future App Hackathon 2023

On August 15, we announced the winners of this year’s TiDB FutureApp Hackathon and celebrated the closing of a great community event that kicked off on June 6. During the Hackathon, we had 1,490 participants from 87 countries forming 180 teams and submitting 100 projects.

Beyond the quantity, we were extremely impressed with the quality and innovative nature of the majority of projects. We obviously want to congratulate all the prize winners from what turned out to be a very competitive group. However, even amongst projects that didn’t win awards, we were inspired by projects that tackled a wide variety of issues including:

Helping farmers in sub-saharan Africa
Finding the best servers for online gaming
Making it easier for people to track nutritional intakes

Just to name a few. If you want to take a look at the Hackathon projects (including demo videos), you can check out the project gallery.

Popular Trends and Themes

A key theme of this year’s Hackathon was TiDB Serverless. Many projects did a wonderful job building a cost- effective solution that seamlessly scaled with data workloads. Most projects—sometimes with just 1-2 developers—developed their solutions in just a few weeks as they let TiDB Serverless’ fully-managed solution abstract away tedious infrastructure management tasks. In sum, we were impressed to see many teams take advantage of TiDB’s transactional and analytical capabilities. They showcase embedded analytics dashboards in their applications.

Additionally, AI was another popular theme. Many projects used vector databases such as Pinecone or Qdrant along with TiDB to build their applications. Even for projects that were not AI-focused, a number of teams took advantage of TiDB Serverless’ Chat2Query feature for generating SQL queries.

Finally, as a long-time open source community manager, it was heartening to see many project teams open source their project repositories via GitHub for everyone to view and contribute to.

Wrapping Up

Following the event, our plan is to continue highlighting many of the Hackathon projects in virtual meetups and during the opening sessions of the HTAP Summit in a few weeks. Please stay tuned for these and other events!

We’re definitely planning on another edition of TiDB FutureApp Hackathon in 2024. We’re also looking into other smaller event(s) where TiDB community members can come together and collaborate. As soon as our plans come together, we will definitely let you know.

Finally, we encourage you to explore our Data in the Hallway podcast series where we discuss community, database, open source and other topics. You can save the YouTube podcast playlist or find the series on your favorite podcast platforms.