Register Now for the 2026 Pythia Hackathon
Join Project Pythia June 15-18, 2026 in-person in Boulder, CO at the NCAR Mesa Lab. Seating is limited, and registration closes to all May 22, 2026. As part of registration, you can apply for funding for domestic travel to Boulder to participate! Registrations seeking this travel funding are due by March 22, 2026. Collaborate with others to develop your open source development skills and create free reusable online science and teaching resources. Continue reading for additional details.
Register now!
Visit the event page at ProjectPythia.org for more information
What is it?
Project Pythia (ProjectPythia.org) is announcing the 2026 edition of its annual Cook-off hackathon for creating and maintaining Pythia Cookbooks. Pythia Cookbooks are crowd-sourced collections of domain-specific tutorials and exemplar workflows, building upon Project Pythia's Foundations tutorials. Cookbooks are supported by a rich GitHub-based infrastructure enabling collaborative authoring and automated health-checking to ensure reproducibility. Participants in the Cook-off will develop their skills in contributing code and non-code resources to open source projects, demonstrating open science practices, and communicating and collaborating with other professionals. Along the way they will grow the collection of accessible, reusable, and reproducible Cookbooks. This is a space for scientists, educators, and developers to bring their ideas, existing code, or rough notebooks and collaborate on turning them into community Cookbooks.
Who is this for?
You! Hackathon may be a scary word, but this event is for students, scientists, educators, engineers, hobbyists, professionals, and more across a spectrum of expertise and ability. Familiarity with Python, git and GitHub, and Jupyter will help you best collaborate with others and build your skills during the brief Hackathon period. Check out Pythia Foundations for a crash course in these topics. We also encourage non-code participation through the creation of narrative text, images or GIFs, and even produced videos to support Cookbook content. Pythia is committed to building a community for geoscientists to come together and share open source solutions. We hope that our platform can represent and support the many voices working together to solve a global challenge.
2025 Project Pythia Cook-off hackathon participant group photograph, in the NCAR Mesa Laboratory lobby, Boulder, CO.
Content leaders and technical facilitators needed
We are seeking breakout session content leaders with creative ideas for new or expanded Pythia Cookbooks to guide a hands-on hackathon experience. Ideal projects identify a focused scientific or technical problem, have a practical workflow, and can be completed collaboratively in a short, sprint-style format. Breakout leaders will help shape the session goals, mentor participants, and drive the development of reusable, open, and community-facing cookbook content. If you have an idea that could empower the Earth Systems Science community through reproducible, open-source workflows, please share your thoughts in the registration form. We are also seeking technical breakout facilitators that will provide per-group technical leadership through community participation. If you have experience with open source contributions, particularly through git and GitHub, we would greatly benefit from your participation. If you are interested in serving as either a content leader or breakout facilitator, please indicate so on the registration form. You can also email CISL_Events@ucar.edu if you have questions.
Add new comment