Code til Dawn (Oct - Nonprofit Project Night)

Code til Dawn is back — and October is all about building for St. Louis nonprofits.

For our October 30 edition, TechSTL, Turnberry Solutions, and CIC @ Cortex are bringing together 10 St. Louis nonprofit organizations with teams of developers, designers, data analysts, product builders, and other tech professionals for one fast-paced evening of community problem-solving.

Each nonprofit will bring a real technology challenge or project that a team can tackle during the evening. That could mean building or prototyping a website, app, chatbot, AI agent, database, dashboard, digital campaign, automation, or something completely unexpected.

The crazier the idea, the better.

From 5:00–11:00 PM, participants will form teams around nonprofit projects and spend the evening designing, building, testing, and creating something tangible that can help these organizations better serve the St. Louis community.

What makes this Code til Dawn different?

• 10 nonprofit projects selected from across the St. Louis region
• Cross-functional teams of developers, designers, analysts, strategists, and product builders
• Roughly four focused hours of collaborative building
• Experienced mentors available to help teams work through technical and product challenges
• Dinner provided for participants
• A chance to apply your skills to a real community need while meeting some of the region’s best builders

You do not need to come with a team or a project. Just bring your skills, curiosity, laptop, and willingness to jump in.
Early-career technologists, experienced professionals, students, founders, designers, developers, analysts, AI builders, and technical leaders are all welcome. We’ll help connect participants with projects where their experience can add value.

For nonprofits
Have a technology idea you’ve wanted to tackle but haven’t had the time, budget, or technical capacity to build?

We’re selecting 10 St. Louis nonprofits to participate in the October Code til Dawn.

We’re looking for projects that a small team can make meaningful progress on in a single evening. Websites, apps, dashboards, databases, AI tools, chatbots, automations, campaigns, prototypes, and experimental ideas are all fair game.

Nonprofits can apply here:
https://airtable.com/appRplLG7mEmxAi86/pagb4E6OabDVoevHK/form

First 5 projects:
🏠 House Everyone STL is seeking technical support to help prepare a volunteer management app for use by St. Louis emergency shelters this winter. Originally developed through SLU’s Open Source program with additional mentorship from WWT’s Women in Tech ERG, the project will focus on defining and completing the critical work needed to move the platform from development into real-world use—helping shelters better coordinate volunteers and respond to community needs during the coldest months of the year. https://houseeveryonestl.org/

🤝 Show Me Peace is seeking technical support to strengthen and scale the Salesforce database powering its community violence intervention work across St. Louis City. The project will focus on improving workflow automation, connecting interventions with conflicts and shooting incidents, and making reporting more accurate and efficient—helping frontline teams spend less time managing data and more time supporting the community. https://www.showmepeace.org/

🩺 STL HELP lends free medical equipment across the St. Louis region, and its data which is required frequently for funder reports is scattered across 53 Jotform forms. A team will build a read-only pipeline to feed a live dashboard of appointments, donations, and clients (by location, equipment type, ZIP, county, veteran status, and age). The main challenge is data cleanup: mapping forms, standardizing fields, and counting items. STL HELP's new WordPress site with Gravity Forms should be live by event day, so a design that can switch data sources is a plus. Stretch goals are historical data, funder report exports, and nightly refresh. https://www.stlhelp.org/

🧬 The Snow Foundation is seeking technical support to explore an app for collecting and integrating longitudinal health data from people living with Wolfram syndrome, including vision, hearing, blood sugar, and sleep metrics. The goal is to create a more consistent way to capture at-home data that can strengthen understanding of the disease’s progression while also supporting the validation of clinical trial outcome measures and the development of new therapies for this rare, devastating childhood-onset condition. https://thesnowfoundation.org/

💻 AIWAF is an open-source adaptive web application firewall that helps protect web applications by detecting suspicious requests and traffic patterns. At Code Til Dawn, we’ll work on a security testing sandbox to test its Python, JavaScript, and Java integrations, identify gaps, and improve protection while keeping legitimate traffic flowing. https://aiwaf.org/

For the tech community
This is your chance to spend a Friday night doing what Code til Dawn does best: building something real, alongside great people, for a purpose.

It’s free. Dinner is provided. And we have a lot of fun.

Friday, October 30 | 5:00–11:00 PM
CIC @ Cortex — South Sarah
Please RSVP. Space is limited.