Entelect Hackathons: A New Format for a New Era

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Entelect Hackathons: A New Format for a New Era

After 15 years, The Entelect Challenge is evolving, and something exciting is taking its place.

For over a decade, The Entelect Challenge has been a proving ground for some of South Africa’s sharpest developers.

Participants dedicated much of a year, to architecting solutions, refining strategies, and pushing their code to its limits, to win their share of over R200,000. It built a genuine community around competitive programming and was widely regarded as South Africa’s biggest coding competition.

Following the legacy of The Entelect Challenge, the time felt right to experiment with something new.

In 2026, Entelect is launching Entelect Hackathons: a series of focused, time-boxed engineering problems that swap the year-long format for something faster, more collaborative, and open to a wider range of participants.

Whether you are a seasoned competitor, a developer who never had the bandwidth to commit to a full year-long challenge, or someone at the beginning stages of their coding journey, there is a place for you in this community.

Participants can expect fresh problem statements, real engineering puzzles, and the chance to collaborate and build at speed. The spirit stays the same: clever thinking, unexpected solutions, and strong code.

Entelect is also exploring the possibility of continuing the tradition of hosting finals and announcing results at Comic Con, keeping the longstanding connection between the developer community and one of South Africa’s most beloved geek gatherings.

More details on the first problem statements and dates are coming soon.

Keep an eye on the Entelect social channels as well as the Entelect Hackathons website for more.

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I don’t think I’ve fully processed this yet.

For 15 years, The Entelect Challenge wasn’t just “another competition.” It was the competition. It was something you built towards over months—sometimes the entire year—iterating, refining, obsessing over every decision, every edge case, every tick.

It wasn’t just about writing code. It was about mastery.

And for me, it was always a dream to win one.

Coming second last year… I really thought that was it. One more step. One more push. A real shot at dethroning Willie—who’s been an absolute monster in this competition for years.

That goal wasn’t just about the title. It was about the journey to get there.

The slow burn of strategy, the constant evolution of your bot, the feeling of knowing that somewhere out there, other people were grinding just as hard—it created something rare. A real competitive ecosystem. A community.

So yeah… this one hurts.

I get the intent behind the hackathon format. It’s faster, more accessible, probably more inclusive. That’s all good. But it’s also something fundamentally different. You can’t replace a year-long strategic battle with a short sprint and expect it to feel the same.

Those two things scratch completely different itches.

I’ll always be grateful for what The Entelect Challenge gave us—the late nights, the breakthroughs, the frustration, the leaderboard climbs, the near misses, the wins.

It built better engineers. It built competitors.

And honestly… it built something I’m not sure we’ll see again anytime soon.

I really hope the new format succeeds. But I also hope we don’t lose what made the original so special.

End of an era.

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Last year my code took on a new form,

Recursion instead of Nested Loops.
And in that I found something truly remarkable…

My code has evolved so much.

I can really understand your own position well, When i first laid eyes on the competition winning became a very good target.

The Heuristic AI style I developed over the years has really become a solid base,
Its fairly compact, and will work well for any GameAI, Where performance matters,
Im slowly building my own universe.

So Im likely going to translate what i learnt into game dev,
The prestige was nice,
The prizemoney was nice,

But in the end Id have done it in a mask for free.
I dont think the journey is ended,
But I do think we should all exchange contacts,

Maybe oneday something resurfaces, Maybe its one of us running the show.

On the other hand, apart form me pushing a bit on Coding Game to get that bot Competitive itch scratched,

Im keeping an eye on the hackathons.
I was intending to also give a lot of my own approaches to starting away this year.

Coding Game has a few interesting Challenges, **Specifically the bot building games sections.
And climbing those leaderboards can get messy,

The process for me was also a but difficult,
I had to find a way to fill the space the Competition took pretty fast,
Because its been quite the ride,

And its not going to be completely replaced, Ever… So I will be watching,
We too need to evolve.

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