Announcing Hackmamba Content Hackathon Hosted by Auth0 and Cloudinary

Are you a software engineer looking to switch gear to technical writing? Are you a technical writer? If so, don’t miss the upcoming Hackmamba Content Hackathon co-sponsored by Auth0 and Cloudinary. Engineers and technical writers of all levels are welcome to join. Register on the Hackathon site, please.

First up on the agenda are workshops on technical writing conducted by seasoned developer advocates, followed by a hackathon, in which you’re welcome to participate. The exercise in question is to build a software product or feature with Jamstack elements by leveraging Cloudinary’s media capabilities and Auth0’s security features and then write a blog post about it for publication on your dev.to account. The experience promises to boost your software development skills with front-end JavaScript technologies like Jamstack.

The Benefits

Learn the ropes of and career opportunities in technical writing.
Join the Cloudinary and Auth0 communities with exclusive access to prizes and job openings.
Network with technical writers and editors.
Stand a chance of winning the grand prize of $1,000 and other prizes.
Publish content on your personal blog on dev.to—with pay.

Ultimately, regardless of whether you win or not, you’ll relish that unique experience while hobnobbing with your peer community.

The Workshops

Between September 16-18, we’ll hold workshops on technical writing, the speakers for which will be announced soon. As hackathon participants, you’re automatically enrolled in the workshops.

The workshops will focus on the following topics:

Introduction to technical writing
Technical-writing processes and tools that help create quality content
Career opportunities and remuneration for technical writing
Software development with Jamstack’s media and security technologies

The Hackathon

The hackathon is a two-week event:

Registration: August 18 to September 15, 2021
Start of the hackathon: September 18, 2021
Content submission: September 26, 2021
Announcement of winners: October 11, 2021

To participate in the hackathon, workshop attendees must apply first. We’ll select a total of 50 participants based on the applicants’ motivation, experience, and diversity. All other workshop attendees are welcome to create content, which might lead to prizes, swag, and paid opportunities at Auth0 and Cloudinary.

Note to participants:

Be creative! Feel free to build your demo with Jamstack tools and technologies.
Share your code on Twitter with #HackJamstackContent to facilitate reposting.

The Prizes

The grand prize is $1,000; the second-place prize, $800; and the third-place prize, $500.
All hackathon participants will be awarded $100 in cash through PayPal or with Bitcoin.

The Judging Criteria

Hackathon participants will use Dropbox Paper as the authoring tool for their blog post. Their software demo must run on CodeSandbox.

The judging criteria for the blog posts are as follows:

Absence of plagiarism
Clarity, conciseness, and directness
Structure of the content flow
Grammatical accuracy and writing style

Prolific editors will edit the posts to ensure their lucidity and clarity before publication on dev.to.

The judging criteria for the hackathon are as follows:

Quality, i.e., does the code work? Is it readable and concise?
Originality, creativity, and uniqueness of the product or feature
Relativity of the product or feature to real-life problems encountered by developers
Execution and deployment, i.e., does the code run on CodeSandbox? Have you published the code to GitHub and deployed it to a provider of your choice?

Penalty

We will disqualify any content or code found to be plagiarized with a plagiarism score of 20% or higher. In addition, we will suggest that the author leave the event.