Host HA Hackathon with Prize to build new Integration

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Hi Everyone.

I’m an Engineer by trade, but for construction and buildings - nothing to do with software or programming. Over the past few years, I’ve become fascinated by the open-source community, home assistant, and how much people put into their integrations they create as well as how much others give back to help others with their integration by improving and maintaining them.

Over the past 1-2 years, Home Assistant has made a huge shift towards UI customization which in my opinion has brought HA to a lot more people, and this idea promotes that effort.

I was curious how I would go about hosting a “hackathon” with maybe a $3500 bounty? This community has been so helpful for me and although I can’t give back in the traditional sense of contributing with my programming efforts, I’m hoping hosting a competition like this would act as my own contribution to Home Assistant.

Summary:
There’s an existing, popular home assistant integration without a UI, and it has a steep learning curve and a strong knowledge of yaml. The competition would basically be to build a UI for it that could be customized with the user’s own entities.

I have a great idea of the competition details, integration details, etc. but wanted to get some initial feedback on suggested platforms and ways to do this ethically and in an organized manner.

Any help or resources to make this happen would be very much appreciated!

Nick

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It’s great you want to do this, but most of the smaller hackathons I’ve participated in specifically don’t offer straight cash because of all the legal tax work associated with it.

That said you’ll get WAY more people interested and willing to participate if you are willing to do the tax work and offer a cash prize.

Also ideally you wouldn’t be the sole judge with such an amount on the line if you want it to be in the true hackathon spirit. It would also be nice to open it up to a wider amount of integrations to be worked on.

You could also just straight up hire a consultant to do the work as a straight contract if you just want the one specific integration worked on.