50 Hackers, a Transit Strike, and One Incredible Day in Hamburg

Last Saturday, Julia, An, and I ran our first aviation-themed hackathon with the Social Developers Club. Honestly, I'm still riding the high from it.

The idea was simple: what if we got a bunch of people in a room and challenged them to build real-time, AI-powered travel tools using Gemini 3.0 and live aviation data? LLMs are powerful, but they don't know your flight just got delayed. We wanted to fix that.

The day the trains stopped

Here's the thing nobody planned for: Germany decided to have a national public transport strike on the exact same Saturday.

I genuinely wasn't sure what to expect with no trains running. But 50 people showed up anyway. Some of them walked over an hour just to get to SAE Institute in Hamburg. During a national transit strike, that's dedication. If that doesn't tell you something about the energy of the dev community here, I don't know what does.

14 hours of building (and eating)

We kicked things off at 8 AM with breakfast and coffee, because nobody's building the future on an empty stomach. After a quick intro to the Gemini Grounding API, teams formed, ideas got pitched, and then it was just... heads down, deep work for the rest of the day.

One thing I love about hackathons is watching strangers become teammates in minutes. We required teams of 2–4 (no solo acts allowed), and that constraint did exactly what we hoped: it got people talking, collaborating, and riffing off each other's ideas.

The projects that blew us away

Every team built something cool, but our three winners really stood out:

Team Layla built a smart layover assistant. Got a 3-hour layover in Istanbul? It tells you whether you have enough time to actually leave the airport, explores the city, and gives you a custom route with a timeline so you don't miss your connection. Brilliant.

Team Fenster (German for "window," love the name) created an app that tells you about points of interest at the exact geographical location you're flying over, in real-time. Imagine looking out your airplane window and knowing that the river below you is the Danube, with a little history lesson attached.

Team Discover went a completely different direction with a browser extension. If you're browsing concert tickets in another city, it automatically starts planning your trip: flights, airport routes, the whole thing. It felt like the kind of tool that should already exist.

The messy parts (keeping it real)

Not everything was smooth. We gave teams Google Cloud credits for using the Gemini API, but we underestimated how long it takes to onboard 50 people onto new accounts in a time-pressured setting. I ended up running around helping most teams get set up. Note to future me: prep a step-by-step guide and do a dry run the night before.

Why I keep doing this

Honestly? Organizing this was a blast. Julia, An, and I had a great time putting it together, and on the day itself it all just clicked.

There's something special about seeing someone's face light up when their API call finally returns real flight data. Or watching a team that met three hours ago high-five after their demo. Or hearing that someone walked an hour through a transit strike because they didn't want to miss it.

If you've ever thought about organizing a hackathon, even a small one, just do it. The community will show up. Literally, even when the trains don't.

The Hamburg Hackathon: Innovate the Skies & Beyond was organized by the Social Developers Club on February 28, 2026, at SAE Institute Hamburg.