Announcing the Directus Panel Quest Hackathon

Following the success of the Directus AI Hackathon in August, we are today announcing a brand new contest for October. Directus Insights provides a fantastic canvas for helping people across your organization understand data. During Directus Panel Quest, we're challenging you to build new extensions to enhance and expand your dashboards.

Key Dates

• Hackathon starts: October 4 2023 at 00:00 UTC.
• Submissions end: October 31 2023 at 23:59 UTC.
• Voting period: November 1 2023 until November 8 2023 at 23:59 UTC.
• Winners announced: November 10 2023.

The Challenge

The Directus Insights Module is more powerful than many users realize. Data from your collections can be visualized to glean insights from your Directus project, but panels can do a lot more. You can display and visualize external data via API, or even build forms to interact with your data or external services.

The challenge of Panel Quest is to build new Panel Extensions that interact with or integrate with external services or data. Since Panels only run on the frontend, you should submit a bundle that includes any endpoints required to power your Panel.

Any external API or data will be accepted for this hackathon. Here are a few categories and ideas:

• Communication APIs like Twilio, Vonage, Discord, and Slack
• Marketing platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Mailchimp.
• Developer workflow tools like CircleCI, GitHub, and Vercel.
• AI and Machine Learning APIs like OpenAI, Deepgram, and Replicate.
• Payment and E-commerce platforms like Stripe, Shopify, and GoCardless.
• Device and Browser APIs like sensors, location, and speech.

Submitting Your Project

To submit your project, you must:

• Add your extension code to a public repository on GitHub.
• Use our README template and replace anything in curly brackets with your submission's value.
• Add the directus and directus-panel-quest topics (tags) to your GitHub repository.
• Fill in this form to provide your email address so we can get in touch with the results.

We encourage all projects to include a LICENSE file in your repository with the Apache License 2.0, the GNU General Public License v3.0, or the MIT License.

The submission period ends on October 31 2023 at 23:59 UTC. You must complete all of the steps above by this time to be eligible. If you work with others, only one person must complete the steps.

Judging

On November 1 2023, we will curate all valid submissions into a blog post on the Directus Developer Blog with links to the last commit before the submission deadline (further commits will not be assessed).

Core Team Vote

This award is decided by the core team behind Directus. Each team member is given one vote to cast. When judging projects, we will look at the following criteria with no specific weighting:

1. Creative: Is the idea original and innovative?
2. Technical: How effectively do you integrate the external AP or dataI? Is the project well-executed? Does it run?
3. Relevance: Do you solve a real problem faced by people?
4. Presentation: Have you taken time to add polish to your project?

Judging will take place from November 1 2023 until November 8 at 23:59 UTC.

Community Vote

One of our prizes is decided by the community. From the valid submissions posted on our blog, the repository with the most GitHub Stars before the end of the judging period will win this category. No stars given or removed after the end of the judging period will be accepted.

The Prizes

Both the Directus Core Team and Community Vote prizes are the same:

• $1000 USD awarded to the project submitter.
• $250 USD donation to a charity of the winner’s choice from the following list:
  • codebar - a charity that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by running free regular programming workshops for minority groups in tech.
  • VetsInTech - who support transitioning military, veterans and spouses of either with reintegration services and by connecting them to the national technology ecosystem.
  • Out In Tech - the world’s largest non-profit community of LGBTQ+ tech leaders.
  • Carbon180 works toward developing equitable, science-based policies that will scale carbon removal.
  • Cool Earth works with rainforest communities, tackles the root causes of deforestation, and protects vital carbon sinks.

Winners will be announced at a live Discord event on November 10 2023, and winners contacted over email on the same day.

Resources

We've created a few guides to get you started:

• Create a Panel With Dynamic Form Based On Collection Fields shows you how to build dynamic user forms inside of panels, and create new items in your collections.
• Create A Panel To Display External API Data With Vonage shows you how to visualize external data in your dashboards without needing to import data to Directus first.
• Create An Interactive Panel To Send SMS With Twilio shows you how to build a polished and flexible panel that submits external POST requests.

We also have a few videos to show you how to create extensions:

This last one has an accompanying blog post: Using External Weather Data In A Custom Panel Extension

Additional Notes

• Multiple submissions are allowed, and will be judged separately.
• You own your projects - our incentive is to see the cool things people build.
• We don’t handle prize-splitting, so if you’re working with others and win, we’ll send the prize to the Team Lead and they’ll be responsible for distributing it.
• You can find the Terms & Conditions for this contest here.

Get Started

You can run Directus locally using Docker in just a few minutes

You can find educational resources here on the Directus Developer Blog, in our extension-building guides, and on our YouTube channel.

At any point during the hacking period, feel free to drop by our Discord server and ask for help, or ask questions about the hackathon in the #hackathon channel. We also have fortnightly Office Hours events on Thursdays which we’ll dedicate to the hackathon throughout October.