Shipaton Blogging Contest Winners Announced 🎉

The Shipaton Blogging Contest, a joint initiative of Shipaton 2026 and HackerNoon, concluded with the announcement of its three winners. Initiated two months ago, the contest aimed to acknowledge developers who committed to documenting their efforts in creating useful applications, recognizing that app development involves more than just coding and publishing. Contestants were encouraged to share their experiences, challenges, and breakthroughs with the HackerNoon community, with the promise of a $2,500 cash prize pool.

Over 150 entries were received throughout the contest, demonstrating a strong community interest. Shipaton 2026 concluded without accepting new submissions, reflecting its substantial impact. The contest received an impressive response, with more than 28,000 participants registering for the hackathon on Devpost, and more than 2,600 new apps showcased in the official app showcase.

From among the submissions, 10 finalists were chosen based on the quality, technical substance, and valuable insights into the process of building in public. The finalists were:

1. Akif's Qalaris, an iPad app that simulates a flat-cut reed pen using Apple Pencil data, featuring interaction design, rendering experiments, multimodal AI feedback, and server-side RevenueCat credit accounting.

2. Ushio Hoshino's account of six bugs traced back to one architectural mistake, emphasizing better safeguarding through reachability tests, state variation, and time-aware verification.

3. Darryl Bayliss's Buildhorn progress update, documenting the evolution of a CI-monitoring app built with Kotlin Multiplatform, SwiftUI, Firebase, GitHub Apps, and Firestore.

The winners were announced as follows:

1. Akif earned the top spot with his Qalaris project, receiving $1,200.

2. Ushio Hoshino took second place, with $800 for his insightful exploration of architectural mistakes in his app.

3. Darryl Bayliss came in third, winning $500 for his detailed account of Buildhorn's development.