In March 2025, teams of builders spent a weekend at Aleph Hub in Buenos Aires for Ship BA, billed as the city's first hackathon focused on shipping. Silver.dev was one of the sponsors.
The rules
The brief fit in a tweet. Teams of up to four had 24 hours, starting at noon on Saturday, March 8. The theme was open as long as the product used AI. And the deliverable was a product running in production plus a demo. As the organizers put it weeks before: no slide decks with ideas.
Small teams were on purpose: a few people iterate faster. Mentors were on hand all weekend to unblock teams, and the best projects pitched to the judges at the end.
First place took $2,000 in cash plus $100 in Vercel credits per person.
Through the night
The tables were still full at twenty to three in the morning, and people were still shipping at 5 AM.
What shipped
The organizers published every project afterwards, with links, demo videos and the team behind each one, and opened a public vote next to the judges' picks. The podium:
- Majorana, first place: an assistant for Twitch streamers that reads the chat live and reports its main topics, sentiment and metrics.
- Burro Speech, second place: live AI translation for events, meetings and workshops.
- U0, third place: AI-generated user personas that give feedback on your product before real users do.
Why we sponsor events like this
Our work is finding engineers in Latin America who ship, and placing them with US startups. A hackathon that grades working software over pitch decks is about as close as an event gets to the job itself. Teams had to deploy what they built and demo it the next day.
Buenos Aires has a lot of these engineers. If you want to hire them, our guide to hiring LatAm engineers is the place to start.
More photos and the projects are on @shipbahackathon.