Three Years of HackAthlone

HackAthlone 2025 finished last night, which makes it three consecutive years of the NASA Space Apps Challenge running in the Irish midlands. That was the whole point of starting it.

I had run a Space Apps location before, in Limerick in 2021 and in Vellore back in 2017, so I knew roughly what it takes. What I did not appreciate is how much of running a hackathon is procurement. The first year was mostly a pitch to the faculty dean, a budget that came back for revision more than once, and a venue conversation that ran to the wire.

The objective was never a single good weekend. It was to spread the hackathon movement in Ireland, which means the event has to recur, in the same place, with people who came last year bringing someone new. Three years in, that is what happens, and the registration numbers have moved every year.

Replace the three TODO values with your registrant counts. The markup is in news-hackathlone.html.

This year I also brought industry judges from Boston Scientific onto the panel, which was the first time my research partner and my outreach work met in the same room. Both sides got something out of it. Students met engineers who build things for a living, and the engineers saw a room full of people who will be applying for jobs in two years.

This is likely my last one as a PhD student. The next job is handing it to a team rather than a person, because an event that depends on one individual is not a movement.