Stupid hackathon
Random teams, assigned technologies and one clear rule: build something completely pointless.
For a day and a half at our 2026 autumn conference, we ran a Stupid Hackathon. We who are hard-wired to solve real problems and create real value every day had to do the opposite: build something worthless and silly. We were split into random teams and each given a technology to use. The result was eight fully working prototypes that nobody needs.
The brief
In groups of three, we were to build something completely pointless with the help of AI. Each team came up with its own idea. The only constraint was an assigned technology, and it had to be visible in the solution.
Fredrik – Pointless Travel Planner
How it went
The pace was high from the start. Most happened at three in the afternoon on the first day, with 42 commits in a single hour. The teams built in everything from TypeScript and plain JavaScript to Rust and Swift.
The winner was crowned by Vinnarmaskinen, the Winning Machine, a campaign site Samuel and Elin built during the same days. It starts with modem sounds in a photographed room, shows the day's numbers over a film and finally decodes the name of the winning repo in green matrix rain.
The results
Here are all eight, with the winner Konfetti first. Click through, draw an exquisite corpse, run a dinosaur or let your keyboard send you to the other side of the world. Enjoy.
The demos were judged by a jury of Samuel, Elin and Claude. The prize was medals, cheers, high fives, hugs, respect and eternal glory.
Winner · Konfetti
Konfetti
A programming language written in confetti. A program is coloured paper strips scattered on the ground, inside an outline drawn in chalk. The colour says what to do and the position says where the program goes next. The language is Turing complete and runs around 800 million steps per second.
Programs are written in a 3D editor that looks like a watercolour pop-up book. You fire a confetti cannon, draw the outline and rearrange whatever landed inside. Then you can turn on the wind. Twelve lessons teach the language, and a program can be built into its own app or a web page.
Team: Daniel, Johan and Kina.
Canvas
Party: Fold & draw
Exquisite corpse on your phone, with an AI that names the figure. Players draw the head, body and legs in turn without seeing what the others drew. Only a few guide lines show above the fold. Then the figure is unfolded on a stage with a drumroll, smoke and confetti, gets a silly name and a home town, and can be saved in a shared gallery with a map.
In the Adventurers category, the person drawing the head sees a colleague's face for five seconds and then draws it from memory. The others guess who it is. The game can be played on one phone passed around or on separate devices, and comes in five languages.
Team: Anna, Signe and Joel.
Keyboard only
Tangentiellt
Precision positioning without a pointing device. Put both hands on the keyboard and roll. The centre of gravity of the keys you press becomes a coordinate on Earth, and the service tells you everything it finds about the place: town, weather, a photograph, the nearest Wikipedia article, a species sighting and the local radio station broadcasting from there right now. The position has nothing to do with where you actually are.
The team only reads where the keys sit, never which character they produce, and rotated the projection so that all 78 keys land on land. The confetti is a weather reading, and in the Keyboard brush the number of fingers picks the colour. The limit is six, since a USB keyboard does not report more keys pressed at once.
Team: Harald, Maria and Linus.
3D-driven interface
Pointless travel planner
The worst possible route between two addresses in Stockholm. Pick where you are and where you are going, press start, and the travel planner sends you the long way round the world: out of town, down to a jetty, across oceans and deserts on every vehicle imaginable and finally back to Slussen for the last stretch home.
The journey plays out on a globe of voxels in a custom 3D engine built with three.js. You can follow it in real time or fast-forward at up to ten million times normal speed.
Team: Per, Fredrik and Ola.
Data from an open API
Jurassic Run
Running routes shaped like extinct animals. Pick one of 17 extinct animals, and the app draws a route along real roads in the animal's silhouette, near where you are standing. How closely the route resembles the animal is shown as silhouette precision.
During the run, open data is fetched about the places you pass, such as royal tombs, earthquakes, extreme weather and fossil finds. A coach in the spirit of Chuck Norris comments on everything, and the run ends with an absurd final report.
Team: Axel, Magnus and Erik.
The phone without its screen: camera
YMCA
Write messages with your body. The phone's camera reads the shape of your body and interprets it as letters. Hold a pose for a second and a half, and the letter is added, read out loud and the phone vibrates.
Space, delete and send are poses too, recorded by the team themselves. The send pose posts the message to a Slack channel without anyone touching the screen. No team made more commits.
Team: Clara, Jeanette and Camilla.
The phone without its screen: gyro
Lustiga Huset
Control your home by tilting your phone. A green puck follows the phone's tilt. Sideways changes the volume, forwards and backwards changes the light. Steer into a button to change song, into the bomb for a random song or into the weather button to see the weather where you are. Shake the phone, and the room turns red and says goodbye.
The app controls real lights and speakers through Home Assistant, Philips Hue and Spotify.
Team: Stefan, Henrik and Emma.
Pairing
Carpe Signum
The stars were never close enough. A horoscope based on which Bluetooth devices you have been near during the day, how close and for how long. An AI astrologer interprets the signals with complete seriousness and writes the day's to-do list, from “avoid the printer after two o'clock” to “break up with your partner and leave the country”.
Place the phone face down to consult the signals. When you tick off an item on the list, golden stardust falls. Carpe Signum is an iPhone app written in Swift. The web version can be tried in the browser, with simulated signals.
Team: Frida, Sabine and Debbie.
