Hackathons are time-bound collaborative events that often target software creation. Although hackathons have been studied in the past, existing work focused on in-depth case studies limiting our understanding of hackathons as a software engineering activity. To complement the existing body of knowledge, we introduce HackRep, a dataset of 100,356 hackathon GitHub repositories. We illustrate the ways HackRep can benefit software engineering researchers by presenting a preliminary investigation of hackathon project continuation, hackathon team composition, and an estimation of hackathon geography. We further display the opportunities of using this dataset, for instance showing the possibility of estimating hackathon durations based on commit timestamps.
@article{arxiv.2603.29672,
title = {HackRep: A Large-Scale Dataset of GitHub Hackathon Projects},
author = {Sjoerd Halmans and Lavinia Paganini and Alexander Serebrenik and Alexander Nolte},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.29672},
year = {2026}
}