Celebrating the TiDB Future App Hackathon 2024

During the recent HTAP Summit, I had the honor of celebrating another successful TiDB Future App Hackathon and announcing our winners. This year, we had close to 2,100 participants–about 40% increase from 2023–joining us from 80+ countries. If you visit the Hackathon project gallery, you will be able to see the winners and all other amazing projects from the month-long event. 

In addition to the participants, we also want to thank the amazing line up of sponsors who helped make this year’s event a success. AWS, Anyscale, Dify, Jina.ai, Lepton AI, LlamaIndex, and NPi contributed to the Hackathon by speaking at kickoff events, providing their tools to participants, helping promote the event on social media, serving as Hackathon judges, etc.  

This year’s theme for the Hackathon was TiDB Vector Search and tools from our sponsors helped participants build their AI applications and take advantage of the new vector search capabilities on TiDB Serverless. 

Popular Themes & Tools

When you look at the Hackathon projects, they could be broadly categorized in the following three categories:  

1. Productivity tools for developers, marketing, HR, business insights, etc. 
2. Research/learning aids for contents ranging from academic journals, legal documents, text books, to videos.
3. Fun applications for movies, shopping, sports, travel, etc.

Also, more than 85% of projects had public repositories with open-source licenses such as Apache and MIT, and this is similar to what we saw last year as the vast majority of participants embraced open-source development. 

As for development tools, in addition to tools from our sponsors, many project teams also used Gemini, LangChain, OpenAI, Streamlit, Render, etc. Many of the judges were impressed with very polished submissions, and I believe these tools contributed to easing development effort and to the high quality output. 

What We Learned from the Hackathon

We conducted a post-event survey and received some great feedback both on the event and our product. What was heartening from the survey was that 85% of respondents wanted to participate in our Hackathon again and about half of the survey participants provided us with their contact information for follow-up conversations. We appreciated constructive feedback on areas such as developer resources and helping participants with project ideas, and we will work on these areas for the next Hackathon. 

During the Hackathon, we received numerous questions and valuable feedback about TiDB Vector Search, which is still in its preview stage. One of the frequently asked questions was around bulk inserts. We were able to address some of the issues for example by increasing the default batch size limit, but we will continue to improve the user experience in this area.  

We also received valuable feedback on our documentation. Beyond making straightforward updates like in this PR, we’re exploring the addition of more code examples and debugging tips to further enhance the developer experience. I want to take this opportunity to thank PingCAP colleagues in Engineering and Documentation teams for helping improve the developer experience both during and after the Hackathon. 

What’s Coming Next

We already started reaching out to some of the survey respondents for more in-depth feedback. These conversations will certainly help improve TiDB Vector Search, so we thank many of the participants who are taking the time to help us in the next few weeks. 

We also want to highlight many of the hackathon projects through additional write-ups, interviews, videos, etc. These contents will serve as valuable assets for our community members who want to learn how they can take advantage of TiDB Serverless and Vector Search by getting inspiration from the Hackathon participants. 

We are already looking forward to another edition of TiDB Future App Hackathon next year, so please watch this space for an announcement on our next Hackathon. In the meantime, we  hope you will continue to build your next-gen application on TiDB Cloud Serverless. Happy Hacking!