Dataminded

How Much Do You Bench? Free AI Hackathon For Data Engineers

📅 26 August 2026
🕓 17:00 - 22:00
📍 Antwerp (Boomgaardstraat 115, 2018)

Everyone has the same models now. What separates good AI systems from bad ones is the engineering around them: the context, the tools, the guardrails. That's what we want to get better at, and it's more fun to do it in a room full of engineers trying to out-build each other.
So join us for our upcoming open hackathon! Everyone works on the same open-weight LLM on European infrastructure, locked: no fine-tuning, no model swaps, no extra GPUs. Your levers are the agent harness, the tools it can call, and the context you give it.
You'll get a set of real data engineering tasks, and every run is scored automatically. Highest total at the end of the night wins!
Save your spot by filling in the form. Bring a laptop, come solo or with your friends. Food and drinks on us! Seats limited.

If we want data teams that can deliver in production, we need people who have built real systems. This week is designed for exactly that.

From September 7 to 11, 2026, we run a 5-day, in-person program in Leuven where we work through the foundations of data engineering and apply them in practice. We keep the format simple and focused. Participants prepare with short videos beforehand, and we use the full week on-site for hands-on exercises and building.

We cover the core building blocks of a modern data platform. That includes working with Bash, Git and Linux, setting up environments with Docker, transforming data with dbt and Snowflake, processing data with Spark and Polars, and orchestrating workflows with Airflow. During the final part of the week, we bring it all together in a capstone project where participants build a complete pipeline end to end.

The course is designed for junior and medior profiles with basic Python knowledge. We often see software engineers moving into data, analysts who want to work closer to the platform, and early-career data engineers who want to deepen their practical experience.

We run this as a small group to keep it interactive. There is time to ask questions, discuss trade-offs, and understand how things work beyond the happy path.