Judging.dev: Two UCSC Students Just Fixed the Most Chaotic Part of Every Competition
Cyrus Correll, Morris Richman
Picture a hackathon.
A hundred people have just spent 36 sleepless hours building something. Judges are wandering around with clipboards. Someone's texting the organizer in a panic. The spreadsheet — the spreadsheet — has conflicting scores, missing rows, and a formula that's been broken since 11am. Three judges are double-booked. Nobody knows where Team 7 is presenting. The feedback? Oh, there isn't any.
This is not a rare catastrophe. This is the default state of competitions everywhere.
It turns out that "competition hosting platform" has been a polite fiction for decades. The actual infrastructure was always some variation of a Google Sheet duct-taped to a prayer. Smart, motivated organizers were spending enormous energy on logistics that should have been solved by software — because the software simply didn't exist.
Until two UCSC students decided that was insane.
Enter Hillpost. Their first product, Judging.dev, is the first open source, AI-native, always-free competition hosting platform ever built. Not freemium. Not "free tier with caveats." Always free — full stop. And because it's open source, anyone can inspect it, fork it, build on it, or deploy it themselves.
The founders know the problem from the inside. They've personally hosted over 1,300 participants and deployed more than $1M in sponsorship credits. They weren't theorizing about what's broken. They were living it.
What Judging.dev actually does is deceptively simple: it replaces the chaos layer. Judging assignments are automated. Scores are structured. Feedback reaches participants through a real system, not a post-it. The AI-native architecture means the platform doesn't just manage judging — it helps facilitate it.
The result is that anyone — a student club, a nonprofit, a regional startup community — can run a real competition without a dedicated ops team.
On June 4, Hillpost brings Judging.dev to the stage at SCWorks New Tech Meetup. If you've ever watched a well-intentioned competition collapse under its own logistics, this is the demo you'll want to see.
Competitions deserve better infrastructure. Hillpost built it.
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