A hackathon tech stack that won’t let you down

Road to HackAthlone: 10 days to go

First, some news: Space Apps Connect opens today. It’s the free, optional forum for the NASA Space Apps Challenge, where you can look for teammates and ask Space Apps Navigators and NASA subject matter experts about your challenge and its data. Space Apps publishes its guide to Connect today too.

Now to your tech stack, the set of tools your team uses to build, share and show its project. At a hackathon, the best stack is the one everyone already half knows. This is not the weekend to learn a new framework.

One repository, from the first hour

Put all your code in one GitHub repository. One person creates it at the start of the hackathon and adds everyone else as collaborators. Then everyone works from it.

If you’re new to Git, you need four commands, in this order:

git pull
git add .
git commit -m "Map works"
git push

Pull before you start, so you have everyone else’s changes. Commit when something works, with a short message that says what changed. Then push straight away, so nobody else is working on an old copy.

Merge conflicts happen when two people change the same lines. Avoid most of them by giving each person their own files or folders. If the terminal isn’t for you, GitHub Desktop does the same job with buttons.

Two rules from the Space Apps terms are worth knowing from day one. You “must cite every source that is used in the creation of your project, even if it is open source or freely available”. And your original work is shared as open source: if you don’t choose a licence, NASA will distribute it under the Apache 2.0 licence. Start a README in the repository that lists your data sources, libraries and licence, and keep it up to date.

Free hosting that’s ready by Sunday

A link the judges can open is worth more than a project that only runs on one laptop. These all have free plans:

• GitHub Pages hosts a static website straight from your repository. It’s ideal for plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Vercel and Netlify suit web apps built with frameworks like React. Connect the repository and every push deploys a new version.
• Streamlit Community Cloud hosts Streamlit apps for free. Streamlit turns a Python script into an interactive dashboard, which suits a lot of data challenges.
• Hugging Face Spaces hosts static pages for free, but its Gradio and Docker Spaces need a paid plan to create, so check the current terms before you build around it.

Deploy something in the first few hours, even a page that only says hello. You want deployment problems early, not at lunchtime on Sunday.

A notebook for the data work

Google Colab runs Python in your browser, free of charge, so nobody loses an hour installing things. Use a notebook to explore and clean the data, then move the finished pieces into your app. Save outputs like cleaned CSV files and charts into the repository so the builders can use them. Our post on NASA open data for beginners has a Colab starter for NASA Earth data.

Mock-ups before code

A few minutes of sketching can save hours of rebuilding. Draw the main screen on paper, or use Figma, which has a free Starter plan. Agree on the mock-up as a team, then build it. A good mock-up can even rescue your pitch if the code isn’t ready.

Record a backup demo

Live demos fail. The Wi-Fi drops, a laptop goes to sleep, an API stops answering. Record a short screen video of your demo as soon as it works, and put screenshots in your slides.

In 2025, Debugonauts, third in Athlone, linked a demo video from their Space Apps project page. The 2026 Project Submission Guide, out on 13 November, will set out what your project page needs.

Set up now, build later

Space Apps doesn’t allow any work on your project before the hackathon starts, but getting your tools ready is fine. Before the weekend, make sure everyone has:

• a GitHub account, with Git or GitHub Desktop installed
• a code editor they’re comfortable with, such as Visual Studio Code
• Python or Node.js installed and tested, if your stack needs them
• a Google account for Colab and a Figma account for mock-ups
• an Earthdata Login account, if you’ll use NASA Earth data

Keep an eye out for Global Offers as well. From 13 November, the Space Apps 2026 Global Collaborators, including Google, Microsoft and Miro, offer free tools and resources to participants.

On Friday: how judging works, from your pitch in Athlone to global judging.