HackerNoon's inaugural Shipaton Writing Contest recognizes three developers for documenting their mobile app development journeys, awarding $2,500 in cash prizes as part of its partnership with RevenueCat's Shipaton 2026.
-- HackerNoon, the independent technology publishing platform, has announced the winners of its #Shipaton Writing Contest, held in partnership with RevenueCat as part of Shipaton 2026.
The two-month competition, which ran from August 1 through September 30, 2026, received more than 150 submissions from developers documenting their experiences building, testing, launching and improving mobile applications.
Following a review of the entries, HackerNoon selected three winning stories from a shortlist of 10 finalists, awarding a combined $2,500 in cash prizes.
The contest ran alongside RevenueCat's Shipaton 2026, a global mobile app development hackathon that attracted more than 28,000 registered participants on Devpost. The event's official app showcase features more than 2,600 new applications developed during this year's competition.
As an official Shipaton Build-in-Public partner, HackerNoon provided participants with a platform to share technical challenges, product decisions, development milestones, failed experiments and lessons learned throughout the app-building process.
Unlike competitions focused primarily on finished products or commercial performance, the contest evaluated submissions based on their storytelling quality, technical substance and practical insights into the development process.
“We were one of the first ten companies to raise over $1 million dollars, building in public has been essential to our company’s existence,” said HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke. “It’s been great to read these Shipaton blogs and support the next generation of internet entrepreneurs.”
Shipaton Writing Contest Winners
First Place — Akif ($1,200)
Winning Story: Turning Apple Pencil Into a Reed Pen: How I Built and Shipped Qalaris
Akif secured first place for documenting the development of Qalaris, an iPad application designed to recreate the experience of writing with a traditional flat-cut reed pen using Apple Pencil technology.
The winning article explores interaction design, rendering experiments, multimodal AI-assisted feedback and server-side credit accounting through RevenueCat. It provides a technical account of the decisions and experiments involved in translating a traditional writing experience into a digital application.
Second Place — Ushio Hoshino ($800)
Winning Story: My Safety Checks Were Monuments to Bugs I Had Already Fixed
Ushio Hoshino earned second place for an examination of software testing practices and architectural weaknesses uncovered during development.
The article traces six seemingly unrelated software bugs to a common architectural mistake: designing safeguards around previously encountered failures rather than broader system properties. Through real code examples and successive debugging experiences, Hoshino demonstrates how reachability tests, state variation and time-aware verification can produce more reliable safeguards.
Third Place — Darryl Bayliss ($500)
Winning Story: Building Buildhorn for Shipaton 2026: Week Two Progress
Darryl Bayliss received third place for documenting the development of Buildhorn, a continuous integration monitoring application built using Kotlin Multiplatform, SwiftUI, Firebase, GitHub Apps and Firestore.
The article covers key architectural decisions behind the application, including shared business logic, native user interfaces, authentication, webhook processing, duplicate-event handling and subscription planning. The entry highlights the technical considerations involved in developing a cross-platform application.
Recognizing the Contest Finalists
In addition to the three winners, HackerNoon recognized seven other finalists whose submissions explored a range of software development challenges, product experiments and engineering lessons.
The remaining finalists were Naoto Yamabe, Muhammad Abdullah, Casey, Amit Kumar Gupta, Peter Dongo, AK and Maxime Deleau.
Their entries addressed topics including application security, authentication and authorization, event-driven architecture, subscription trial vulnerabilities, cross-platform development, personal journaling applications and the distinction between attracting an audience and acquiring actual users.
All 10 finalists were selected from more than 150 submissions published during the contest period.
Readers can explore the participating developers' work through HackerNoon's #shipaton collection.
Supporting Developers Through Build-in-Public Storytelling
The Shipaton Writing Contest was launched to encourage developers to share the work behind their applications, rather than focusing exclusively on finished products.
By highlighting these stories, HackerNoon and RevenueCat aimed to make practical development knowledge accessible to the wider technology community while recognizing the effort required to bring new applications to market.
The $2,500 writing contest prize pool was awarded separately from Shipaton's official hackathon prizes.
HackerNoon congratulates the winners and finalists and thanks all participating developers and RevenueCat for supporting the inaugural competition.
The winning stories and additional contest submissions remain available on HackerNoon.
Media Contact
Sheharyar Khan
HackerNoon
About HackerNoon
How hackers start their afternoons. HackerNoon is built for technologists to read, write and publish. It is an open and international community of more than 50,000 contributing writers publishing stories and expertise for more than 4 million curious and insightful monthly readers.
Founded in 2016, HackerNoon is an independent technology publishing platform run by David Smooke and Linh Dao Smooke. Learn more at HackerNoon.com.
About RevenueCat
RevenueCat is a leading platform for building, managing and growing in-app purchase and subscription businesses. Its cross-platform infrastructure helps developers implement purchases, validate transactions, manage customer entitlements, analyze subscription performance and optimize monetization across iOS, Android and the web. Learn more at RevenueCat.com.
Contact Info:
Name: Sheharyar Khan
Email: Send Email
Organization: HackerNoon
Website: https://hackernoon.com/
Release ID: 89207537
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