[Webpack] Organization of a Webpack Hackathon

[ovflowd]

Hi all! 👋

The Webpack project is exploring the idea of hosting a community Hackathon later this year to drive contributions toward key improvements in the project. Webpack is currently maintained by a small number of contributors, and we see this as a way to make meaningful progress on important work—from minor bug fixes and new features to major performance improvements.

Despite the rise of newer tools like Esbuild, Rspack, Rollup, and Vite, Webpack continues to be a foundational part of the web ecosystem with the largest plugin and user community. Even modest performance gains (e.g., a 20% improvement) could have a significant impact for developers worldwide.

We envision a focused event with curated issues for contributors to work on, similar in spirit to Hacktoberfest. However, successful contributions would be eligible for funding via Webpack’s OpenCollective, following our usual disbursement model.

We’d love to bring this idea to the CPC/Foundation to:

• Discuss how we might reward contributors participating in the hackathon
• Explore the possibility of offering prizes for high-impact contributions
• Consider co-marketing the event with support from the Foundation
• Learn from anyone in the Foundation (CPC members or staff) who has experience organizing similar events

Some early thoughts:

• The event would be online-only, hosted on Discord
• We’d pre-select a list of issues for contributors to tackle
• There may be multiple contributors working on the same issue (still figuring out how to coordinate/avoid overlap)
• Tentative timeline: Q4 2025

We’d like to get this added to an upcoming CPC agenda for discussion—both to gather feedback and understand what’s feasible or permitted. For example: can individual projects run their own hackathons, or would this need to be coordinated through the Foundation?

[ovflowd]

Upstream Issue: webpack/tsc#16

[tobie]

Notes from this week's CPC call:

• Did you get the kind of feedback you wanted?
• Are you running it?
• If so, would you be willing to share your learnings with the CPC?

[ovflowd]

Apologies, @tobie I haven't had much time to go over this, will bring this to the Webpack TSC so we can discuss it.