about hackathon singapore

what this is

Hackathon Singapore is a listings directory. It tracks hackathons taking place in Singapore and puts them on one page, sorted by date, with the dates, venue, ticket price and prize information attached to each one. It browses by theme and by format — in-person or online — rather than by city, because Singapore is a city-state and a list of district pages would be a list of one thing said ten ways.

Right now there are 10 upcoming events listed. That number moves every week — the collection run adds what it finds, and an event drops out of the main list into the archive once it has happened. The directory is new, so expect it to be on the thin side for a while; what is here is real.

We do not run hackathons. Every listing links out to the organiser's own page, which is where registration, rules, schedules and any questions about the event itself belong. Think of this as an index, not an intermediary.

where the listings come from

Listings are gathered automatically. Once a week, on a Sunday, a collection run checks the public event platforms that Singapore hackathon organisers actually use — Eventbrite (the eventbrite.sg catalogue), Devpost, Luma and Meetup — and collects anything that looks like a hackathon happening in Singapore. Organisers can also add an event directly through the submit form.

Automated collection is the only way to keep a directory of this kind current, but it is also the part most likely to be wrong, so candidates are filtered before they are published:

• Singapore only. This is harder here than in most markets, because there is no language signal at all — in either direction. Singapore works in English, and so do Malaysia, Australia, the UK, the US, India, the Philippines and Hong Kong, so an English-language page is no evidence of anything and there is nothing to weigh it against. Attribution is geographic only. An event is accepted when something concrete places it here: a .sg link, the Asia/Singapore timezone by name (never by its offset — Kuala Lumpur is also UTC+8), the literal country token, a six-digit postal code inside a Singapore address, or a Singapore institution as the venue. Several of those have obvious-looking weaker versions we deliberately do not use: a bare six-digit number is not a postal code, and an organiser headquartered here is not a venue — Singapore is a regional-headquarters city, and a company based on Shenton Way runs plenty of events in Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City. Names that are also places elsewhere — Woodlands, Queenstown, Orchard, Novena, Dover, Somerset — are never read as Singaporean on their own.
• Actually a hackathon. Build weekends, game jams, buildathons, datathons and hack days, code jams and similar hands-on competitions. Conferences, webinars, masterclasses and meetups that merely mention the word do not qualify, and neither do the “life hack”, “wellness hack” and “biohacking” events that share the keyword.
• Online events need a Singapore signal. For Devpost, Luma and Meetup an online listing is only kept if something ties it here — a .sg link, the Asia/Singapore timezone, Singapore-only eligibility rules, or weaker hints together such as a Singapore institution and a Singapore organiser. Prize money in Singapore dollars is not one of them on its own, and neither is a regional framing: an “APAC”, “Southeast Asia” or “ASEAN” online event is a regional event, not a Singapore one, however Singaporean its organiser. Eventbrite is the weak joint, and it cuts the other way: its online listings carry no venue at all, so the one thing left to test is the organiser's timezone. That test is narrower than it sounds — it accepts the single zone name Asia/Singapore and nothing else, so a Kuala Lumpur organiser does not slip through on the shared UTC+8 offset — but it is still one signal where every other route wants several. In practice it is carrying nothing at all: across every Eventbrite listing this edition has looked at, not one was filed as an online event, because Eventbrite files those under a global online catalogue that a Singapore place search never returns. Every Eventbrite listing on this site has a physical Singapore address. We would rather tell you where the weak joint is than wait to be asked.
• Still upcoming. Past events move to an archive section rather than the main listings.
• Not a duplicate. The same event cross-posted to two platforms is matched on its link or its title and merged into one listing.

how the listings are written

Once an event is accepted, its page is read and the details are pulled out — dates normalised and 24-hour times in the event's own timezone (Singapore is a single zone at UTC+8 all year, with no daylight saving and no change since 1982, so the offset on a listing is the same in January as in July), prices to Singapore dollars written the local way with the symbol first, the venue and address separated out, and the banner image copied onto our own servers rather than hotlinked from the organiser.

Dates are the one thing the model does not have the final say on: where the organiser's page publishes exact start and end timestamps, those are written over whatever the model produced.

why there are no city pages

Every other site in this network browses by city: eight or ten hub pages, with the suburbs and regions around each one folded in. This one does not, and the reason is not that Singapore is small — it is that the browse axis would carry no information. Singapore is a city-state about 50 km end to end, and every venue on this site is inside an hour of every other by MRT. A page for one-north and a page for the CBD would list the same events to the same people.

We checked rather than assumed. Search demand for “hackathon” plus a district — one-north, Jurong, Tampines, Changi, Punggol, the CBD, Marina Bay, Orchard, Woodlands, Novena — returns no measurable data at all, while the country term is searched several hundred times a month. Ten district pages would have been ten thin pages competing with this site’s own homepage for the one term that matters, and the source data could not have filled them honestly either: Eventbrite and Luma both return “Singapore” as the city, so a district would have had to be guessed from a postal code that fewer than half of listings carry.

So every listing browses under Singapore, and each event’s own page carries its real venue and address — Fusionopolis, Marina Bay Sands, Changi Business Park, the NUS, NTU, SMU or SUTD campus, wherever it actually is. The distinction that does carry information is in-person against online, and that is a filter on the homepage rather than a page of its own. The other browse axis is theme.

One consequence worth stating: because there is no city to disambiguate, the filtering leans entirely on country evidence, which is why the section above spends so long on it. A listing from Johor Bahru or Batam is a 30-kilometre and a 45-minute-ferry mistake respectively, and neither would look wrong on a city page.

who it's for

Three groups, in roughly that order of size:

• People who want to build something. Developers, designers, data people, students and founders looking for something to enter this weekend — on the island, or online.
• Organisers. Anyone running a hackathon in Singapore who wants it found by those people. Listing is free through the submit form, and the pipeline will often find your event on its own before you get round to submitting it.
• Universities, polytechnics, agencies and companies. A faculty or student club running a campus hackathon, a corporate innovation team programming an internal build weekend, a statutory board opening a public-service brief, and anyone trying to see what the rest of the calendar already looks like before picking a date of their own.

Student-run campus hackathons, corporate innovation weekends, government and civic-technology challenges, charity build days and independent game jams are all in scope. The site is in English throughout, which is the working language of every one of these events; event names, organisation names and place names are kept exactly as their organisers write them.

how this site makes money, and what that changes

Being listed is free and always will be — the directory would be worthless if it only contained events that paid to be in it. Organisers can optionally pay for a featured listing: a one-off S$50, which puts a banner for the event across every page of the site for seven days. That is the whole of what the money buys, and the full terms are on the submit page.

It does not buy an email to our subscribers — this edition captures newsletter signups but has no outbound mail provider attached and has never sent a message, so promising a send would be promising something that cannot happen.

A featured listing buys placement and nothing else. It does not change whether an event is listed, and it does not change the order of the ordinary listings, which are sorted by date. We are not affiliated with Eventbrite, Devpost, Luma or Meetup, we are not paid by them, and outbound links to organiser pages are not affiliate links — we earn nothing when you register for an event.

editorial stance

• Completeness over curation. The aim is every Singapore hackathon, not a shortlist of the ones we like. We do not rate, rank or review events.
• Organisers own their description. Descriptions are the organiser's own words; summaries are condensed from them, as described above. We do not add promotional claims of our own.
• Corrections are free and fast. There is no fee to fix or remove a listing, including a featured one.
• No dark patterns. No cookie wall, no third-party analytics, no advertising trackers. See the privacy policy for exactly what is and is not collected.

the rest of the network

Hackathon Singapore is the Singapore edition of a small network of national hackathon directories built on the same pipeline. The others are Hackathons Australia, Canada Hackathons, UK Hackathons, Hackathons USA, Hackathon España, and Hackathon Deutschland and Hackathon France. Each one covers its own country only: the filters, the geography and the currency are built for that market, so a Singapore event will never turn up on the UK site and vice versa. They are linked in the footer of every page.

who publishes this

Not stated yet, and we are not going to make it up. Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act 2012 (the PDPA) requires an organisation that collects personal data to designate a Data Protection Officer and to publish their business contact information. The operating entity behind Hackathon Singapore is still being settled, so neither the entity nor a DPO is named here yet; both will be published as soon as those details are provided. Everything else on this page — where the listings come from, how they are filtered, how the money works — is already true and checkable today, and the privacy policy says the same thing about who the data controller is.

get in touch

Corrections, questions, removal requests and press enquiries all go to the same place — see the contact page. Organisers with an event to add should use the submit form.