The All-Female Berlin Geekettes Hackathon is Back with a Bang

By David Knight |

After a hugely successful trial run earlier this year, the Berlin Geekettes’ all-women hackathon is back this weekend. Organised together with Coca-Cola, the free event takes place at the drinks giant’s Berlin HQ from Friday to Sunday and is open all developers, both novice and advanced.

Teams will be formed with the help of SoundCloud developers and can then decide which APIs to use for their hack. The projects will be showcased on Sunday with the pubic invited to come check it out.

And it’s not your usual hackathon – rather, it has some rather feminine touches. For example, the two-day program is broken up by breaks for yoga and exercises, and the food and drink on offer will be a tad healthier than your usual pizza, beer and club mate.

Prizes on offer for the best hacks include three round trips with accommodation to Coke’s head office in Atlanta to meet top female executives and the chance to pitch to the Coca-Cola Germany accelerator team, as well as iPads, kindles, Etsy gift cards and even cash.

The hackathon is intended to continue the Berlin tradition of free-form coding event with an all-women twist. It’s open to all kinds of projects including software, mobile dev, web dev and more, and designers and anyone with great ideas is welcome.

You can also apply as a domain experts if you know a lot about one specific topic (such as design, JavaScript, or product) and help support others with their hack. “Coca-Cola always wants to drive innovation and is keen to support great female talent,” said Nadine Ziese, human resources director at Coca-Cola Berlin. “We are very excited to learn more about this way of networking.”

Jess Erickson, founder of the Berlin Geekettes, said: “I’m excited for women to come together and create new innovation and push the general community of female developers in Berlin. It’s great to see this idea come to life.”

You can apply to take part here.