Newsmatics Hackathon

On 27-28 February 2026 I took part in the Newsmatics Hackathon in Brno with my team, MOGGERS. We built Newsmatics Globe, a geolocation pipeline: it pulls place names out of news articles with NLP, matches them against the GeoNames database, and plots them on an interactive 3D globe. There's a timeline you can scrub to watch events spread across the map. If you want the detail on the project itself, it's in the projects on my homepage (look for Newsmatics Globe).

The Build

Most of the weekend looked exactly like this: laptops open, too much coffee, working through the pipeline piece by piece. We split the work three ways, one of us on the NLP extraction, one on the GeoNames matching, one on the front-end globe. The back half of the event was mostly stitching it together and tuning the timeline.

Team MOGGERS

We competed as MOGGERS, three of us, each owning a different part of the stack. Pitching the globe to the judges with the timeline running live was the moment everything we'd built that weekend finally clicked into one demo.

The Award Ceremony

The event wrapped up with an award ceremony and certificates for the teams. Standing up there with the organisers and the other participants was a great way to close out an intense couple of days.

Final Thoughts

Hackathons are still my favourite way to build. You get a tight deadline, a real problem, and a small team that has to figure it out fast. Newsmatics Globe started as a weekend project here and turned into one of the things I'm most proud of. Thanks to Newsmatics for putting it on. Their official recap is on the Newsmatics Hackathon 2026 page.

Want the technical details? Head over to the projects on my homepage and find Newsmatics Globe.