about canada hackathons

what this is

Canada Hackathons is a listings directory. It tracks hackathons taking place in Canada and puts them on one page, sorted by date, with the dates, location, ticket price and prize information attached to each one. Right now there are 37 upcoming events listed across 8 city hubs.

We do not run hackathons. Every listing links out to the organiser's own page, which is where registration, rules, schedules and any questions about the event itself belong. Think of this as an index, not an intermediary.

where the listings come from

Listings are gathered automatically. A pipeline checks the public event platforms that Canadian hackathon organisers actually use — Eventbrite, Devpost andLuma — and collects anything that looks like a hackathon happening in Canada. Organisers can also add an event directly through the submit form.

A fourth platform, Humanitix, was tested and switched off: a Canada-scoped sweep of it returned plenty of events but no Canadian hackathons, so it contributes nothing and is not queried.

Automated collection is the only way to keep a directory of this kind current, but it is also the part most likely to be wrong, so candidates are filtered before they are published:

• In Canada. The hard case is place names shared with somewhere else — there is a London, a Cambridge, a Hamilton, a Windsor, a Kingston and a Victoria in Ontario or BC, and also in England or the United States, plus a Vancouver in Washington, a Waterloo in Iowa and a Toronto in Ohio. A shared name on its own is never enough. It has to be settled by something else: the platform's own country field, a province named alongside it, or an explicit “Canada”. A US state in the address rejects the event outright.
• Online events need a Canadian signal. For Devpost and Luma an online listing is only kept if something ties it here — a .ca or .gc.ca link, a Canada-only timezone, Canada-only eligibility rules, or two weaker hints together such as a Canadian university and prize money written in dollars. Two signals are deliberatelydistrusted: bare EST or PST, because the United States uses them too, and a bare “CAD”, which on a hackathon page usually means computer-aided design. Online listings found through Eventbrite's own Canadian search are kept without that extra check.
• Actually a hackathon. Build weekends, game jams, buildathons, datathons, hack days, code jams and similar hands-on competitions. Conferences, webinars, masterclasses and meetups that merely mention the word do not qualify, and neither do the “life hack”, “growth hacking” and “biohacking” events that share the keyword.
• Still upcoming. Past events move to an archive section rather than the main listings.
• Not a duplicate. The same event cross-posted to two platforms is matched on its link or its title and merged into one listing.

how the listings are written

Once an event is accepted, its page is read and the details are pulled out — dates normalised to Canadian format and the event's own timezone, prices to Canadian dollars, the venue and address separated out, the banner image copied onto our own servers rather than hotlinked from the organiser.

Dates are the one thing the model does not have the final say on: where the organiser's page publishes exact start and end timestamps, those are written over whatever the model produced.

how cities work

The 8 city pages — Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Waterloo, Ottawa, Calgary, Winnipeg, Halifax — are hackathonecosystems rather than the 8 largest cities in the country. Waterloo is far smaller than Edmonton or Quebec City but runs a much denser hackathon calendar, so it gets its own page while other cities fold into the closest hub for browsing purposes.

So Kitchener, Cambridge and Guelph browse under Waterloo; Mississauga, Brampton and Hamilton under Toronto; Edmonton under Calgary; Quebec City under Montreal; Saskatoon and Regina under Winnipeg; and the Atlantic cities under Halifax. An event's own page always shows its real venue and address — the grouping only affects which city page you find it on. A handful of listings sit too far from any hub to be grouped honestly, and those simply appear in the main listings without a city page of their own.

who it's for

Developers, designers, students and founders looking for something to build at this weekend — and organisers who want their event found by those people. Student-run university hackathons, corporate innovation weekends, charity build days and independent game jams are all in scope.

how this site makes money, and what that changes

Being listed is free and always will be — the directory would be worthless if it only contained events that paid to be in it. Organisers can optionally pay for a featured listing, which buys a banner across the site for seven days. What that includes is set out on the submit page rather than restated here, so there is only one description of it to keep accurate.

A featured listing buys placement and nothing else. It does not change whether an event is listed, and it does not change the order of the ordinary listings, which are sorted by date. We are not affiliated with Eventbrite, Devpost or Luma, we are not paid by them, and outbound links to organiser pages are not affiliate links — we earn nothing when you register for an event.

editorial stance

• Completeness over curation. The aim is every Canadian hackathon, not a shortlist of the ones we like. We do not rate, rank or review events.
• Organisers own their description. Descriptions are the organiser's own words; summaries are condensed from them, as described above. We do not add promotional claims of our own.
• Corrections are free and fast. There is no fee to fix or remove a listing, including a featured one.
• No dark patterns. No cookie wall, no third-party analytics, no advertising trackers. See the privacy policy for exactly what is and is not collected.

get in touch

Corrections, questions, removal requests and press enquiries all go to the same place — see thecontact page. Organisers with an event to add should use thesubmit form.