Summer Open Registration:

Build Your Portfolio with Real-World Business Experience

Summer Open is a 36-hour virtual hackathon designed for students and early-career developers who want to gain hands-on experience with the types of problems you'll solve in the working world. Instead of building toy apps for your portfolio, you'll tackle realistic business challenges that demonstrate your ability to think like a professional developer.

What Makes Summer Open Special:

🎓 Career-Focused Learning - Work on enterprise-level challenges like data transformation, process automation, and business analytics. Build portfolio projects that show employers you understand business needs, not just coding syntax.

💼 Professional Skills Development - Learn to balance technical requirements with user experience, data accuracy with performance, and innovation with practicality. These are the skills that separate junior developers from standout candidates.

🌍 Accessible to Everyone - Whether you're a CS student prepping for interviews, a bootcamp grad building your portfolio, or someone career-changing into tech - this event levels the playing field with achievable, meaningful challenges.

⚡ Summer Skill Building - Use your summer strategically. Instead of another tutorial project, build something that demonstrates real problem-solving abilities to future employers.

Participants will tackle realistic scenarios like transforming messy Excel payroll data into clean management dashboards, building workflow automation tools, and creating analytics platforms that solve actual business problems.

Saturday, June 28

• 6:00 AM - Opening Remarks & Challenge Release
• 7:00 AM - Hacking Begins / Team Formation
• 12:00 PM - Technical Workshops (Optional)
• 3:00 PM - 9:00 PM - Progress Check-ins & Mentor Office Hours

Sunday, June 29

• 6:00 PM - Final Submission Deadline
• 9:00 PM - Presentations, Judging & Winners Announcement

Perfect For:

• Students building portfolios for internship/job applications
• Recent grads wanting to demonstrate business software experience
• Career changers showing they can solve real workplace problems
• Anyone who wants to practice the skills employers actually value

Transform your summer into a competitive advantage. Build software that shows you're ready for the professional world.

• Criteria Per Prompt
  See your prompt in Discord or on SummerOpen2025.com