Handbook - AI Tinkerers - New York City Hackathon
AI Tinkerers - New York City
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AI Tinkerers - New York City Hackathon

Handbook for the AI Tinkerers - New York City Hackathon hackathon.

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Handbook

Hackathon Participant Handbook

Introduction

Welcome to our AI hackathon! This event is all about building innovative AI-powered applications with the help of cutting-edge development tools. Your mission is to create an AI-driven app that’s original, useful, or even delightfully weird – it could be a voice assistant, a finance agent, a crypto trading bot, or anything you can imagine. We want to see you push AI beyond the ordinary and ship something amazing. This handbook will guide you through the event details and provide a ton of free resources (APIs, datasets, and more) to power your project. The key requirement is that all teams use LiquidMetal AI’s Raindrop platform and Claude Code for development, ensuring you get hands-on experience with these state-of-the-art tools.

Event Overview

Hackathon Format

This hackathon brings together developers, builders, and tinkerers to rapidly prototype AI-native applications. You can participate solo or in a team of up to 4 people. Don’t worry if you don’t have a team – we’ll help match you with others, so everyone can collaborate and contribute.

Tools & Platform

Each project must be built on the Raindrop Platform and developed using an AI coding assistant (Claude Code). Raindrop is the first framework designed for coding agents rather than humans – it lets you build and deploy production-ready apps through AI assistance. Claude Code, Anthropic’s powerful coding AI, works directly with Raindrop’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to help you architect, code, and launch your application faster. In practice, this means you’ll be writing natural-language instructions to Claude, which will generate and manage code/infrastructure on Raindrop for you.

Getting Started

Raindrop’s platform provides Smart Components – SmartBuckets, SmartSQL, SmartMemory, SmartInference – that you can leverage in your app. By describing your application and requirements to Claude Code, you can generate everything from database schemas to API endpoints, with Raindrop handling deployment and scaling automatically.

Hackathon Schedule

The event kicks off with an opening ceremony and a quick workshop on using Raindrop and Claude Code. Then it’s heads-down building time until the final submission deadline, when you’ll demo your working app to judges.

Submission Requirements

To qualify for judging, you’ll need to submit:

  • A link to your live deployed app (Raindrop provides URLs for projects)
  • A short demo video (2–3 minutes)
  • Access to your source code (GitHub repo or ZIP)

Judges will evaluate based on innovation, real-world usefulness, technical execution, and creative use of AI.

Technical Requirements & Guidelines

Use of Raindrop

Your application’s backend must run on LiquidMetal AI’s Raindrop platform. Raindrop is “Claude-native” – it’s designed to be operated by AI agents (like Claude) via the Model Context Protocol. Raindrop sets up databases, APIs, authentication, and more, guided by Claude Code.

Using Claude Code

Participants must use an AI coding assistant, ideally Claude Code. Treat Claude as a junior developer: be clear, test results, and iterate. You maintain control over what gets deployed.

Additional Tools

You can use any frameworks or libraries in Raindrop (e.g. Python libraries for finance or APIs). For frontend hosting, use Netlify or Vercel. For authentication, try WorkOS (free tier for 1M users). For payments, Stripe test mode is available.

Free APIs and Data Resources

Free Financial Market APIs

Cryptocurrency APIs

Open Financial Datasets

Open-Source Tools for Finance

  • CCXT — Crypto exchange trading library.
  • Freqtrade — Open-source crypto trading bot.
  • Hummingbot — Market-making bot framework.
  • Backtrader — Backtesting trading strategies.
  • Alpaca — Paper trading API for stocks.
  • PyPortfolioOpt — Portfolio optimization.
  • TA-Lib — Technical analysis library.

Other Free Services

Closing Notes

Use these resources to create something truly original. The best projects combine strong engineering with creativity and real-world impact. Good luck and happy hacking!