At Codeable, we’re more than a marketplace—we’re a community built with heart. That mission comes to life when we show up in places where collaboration, purpose, and innovation intersect. The CloudFest Hackathon 2025 was one of those places.
Held from March 15–17 at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany, the hackathon brought together over 100 developers, designers, and technologists from across the globe to build open-source tools with lasting impact. Codeable returned as a proud sponsor—and this year, we brought even more of ourselves to the table.
Supporting Open Source, Beyond the Code
For us, supporting open source isn’t just about writing code. It’s about investing in the people and ecosystems that help shape a better web.
As a Hackathon Partner Sponsor, our contribution helped make the event financially possible. But more importantly, it had a direct and immediate impact on the contributors who made the event what it was.
Through our sponsorship:
- We helped cover accommodation and meals for five open-source contributors, making it easier for them to participate without financial barriers.
- We chose to keep our on-site presence small—just one crew member from Codeable—so we could direct more of our resources to support the broader community of attendees.
- We also backed the Pitch Perfect Award, which recognizes teams that communicate their ideas clearly and effectively—something we believe is just as important as the code itself.
The Hackathon awards and their dedicated fundraising directly supports a cause close to our hearts: Groundbreaker Talents, a nonprofit that provides fully funded residential scholarships in software engineering for young women in Uganda.
This balance of presence and purpose reflects how we show up: with intention, impact, and heart.
Codeable in the Field
Several Codeable experts joined project teams and brought their skills to open-source initiatives that focused on accessibility, developer tooling, CMS interoperability, and secure infrastructure. These projects reflected not just technical excellence, but also a shared commitment to shaping a more inclusive and forward-thinking web.
As the WordPress ecosystem—and the broader tech world—works to find its place in an increasingly AI-driven landscape, it’s becoming clear that artificial intelligence will be an integral part of how we build, create, and collaborate.
At Codeable, we see AI not as a replacement for human expertise, but as a tool to enhance it—something to keep in our toolbox alongside the experience, empathy, and problem-solving that define great development work. We believe the future of WordPress includes AI—but it must also include intention, ethics, and a human-centered approach.
The projects our experts contributed to at CloudFest Hackathon 2025 embody this mindset. Here’s a closer look at where they have been involved in and tools they helped bring to life:
CMS Freedom
1st place 🏅Pitch Perfect Award
Contributor: Birgit Olzem
This project simplifies the migration of websites from HTML to CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla!, Typo3, and Drupal – supporting open web interoperability and user choice. It’s a vision that aligns perfectly with the open web ethos.
Accessible Infographics
🏅Overall Winner + 1st place 🏅Breaking Barriers Awards
Contributors: Zeshan Ahmed and his brother Farhan Ahmed
Focused on inclusive design, this WordPress plugin improves infographic accessibility by automating structured data, alt text, and screen-reader compatibility. It took home two of the event’s most meaningful honors: Overall Winner and Breaking Barriers Award.
Our team worked on Visua11y, an open-source project focused on making infographics more accessible for individuals who rely on screen readers.
I led the AI development and implementation, working on structuring AI-generated descriptions and extracting data from infographics to improve accessibility. – Zeshan Ahmed
WP-CLI as an MCP Host
1st place🏅 Social Media Master Award
Contributors: Jan-Willem Oostendorp, Matt Biscay, Tome Pajkovski
A project blending AI with WP-CLI to streamline developer workflows via natural language prompts.
This is my fourth Rodeo. And it’s always amazing. Touching tech you would not in your normal work. And explore it with other people.
The project this year is best summarized with this example prompt: list the last 5 posts with category food and create a new page with the summary. Then create an image to match it and attach it as a featured image.
We achieved a working prototype of this in 2 days using the new MCP protocol. – Jan-Willem Oostendorp, Codeable Expert
Peer-to-Peer Federated RAG Framework
1st place 🏅 Tech Visionary + 1st place 🏅 Dream Team Awards
Project Lead: Wesley Stessens
The team built a fully distributed, censorship-resistant peer-to-peer system with no single point of failure. Their MVP features a chatbot that queries expert nodes to deliver relevant answers, advancing distributed RAG research. They also laid the groundwork for a data reliability consensus protocol. The diverse team, spanning seven nationalities, collaborated across Go, Python, and PHP.
We had an amazing time at the CloudFest 2025 Hackathon. Winning the Dream Team award was just inevitable with our amazing Dragon Team! But taking home the Tech Visionary award as well? That was an unexpected but very fun surprise! – Wesley Stessens
Securing the OSS Supply Chain
1st place 🏅Pitch Perfect Award + 3rd place 🏅Tech Visionary Award
Contributor: Lucio Sá
Focused on improving transparency and compliance in open-source dependency management.
Federated Community Events
3rd place 🏅 Dream Team Award
Contributor: Shanta Nathwani
A tool to empower community builders with decentralized, cross-platform event listings.
“I had the privilege to attend the CloudFest Hackathon for the second year. I joined the team for Federated Community Events. While we didn’t win any of the awards, there was still benefit to me, especially for learning more about the Fediverse and what it really means to the Open-Source Community.
I feel like I contributed to the team, not in coding, but in discussion and content creation, since I helped with the website.
I am motivated to learn more about it and contribute to it further in the future. The best part about it, of course, was the people. I got to see some old friends and make some new ones. I can’t wait until next year.” – Shanta Nathwani, Codeable Expert
AIccessibility Content Updater
3rd place 🏅 Breaking Barriers Award
Project Lead: Nemanja Cimbaljevic
A WordPress plugin using AI to identify and fix accessibility issues in website content.
“We pivoted from making a magic wand to creating an educational tool to help developers and site owners to better understand accessibility”. – Nemanja Cimbaljevic, Codeable Expert
What It Means to Be Built With Heart
The CloudFest Hackathon wasn’t just about code—it was about people. Over 2,640+ hours of open-source collaboration, 110 participants worked on tools that will make the web more secure, inclusive, and open.
At Codeable, being built with heart means showing up with purpose, putting our support where it matters most, and championing those who are shaping the web for the better.
From mentorship and sponsorship to direct code contributions, we’re proud of the role our community played—and even more excited about what’s ahead.
Looking Ahead
We’ll continue to support the spaces where open source is created, shared, and celebrated. Whether that’s through programs like Groundbreaker Talents or community-led events like CloudFest, we’re committed to backing the people who move our industry forward.
To everyone who organized, contributed, and collaborated: thank you. We’re already looking forward to the next chapter.
At Codeable, we’re built with heart—and we’re proud to help build the future of the open web, one contribution at a time.
Photo credits for the featured image and the Codeable group photo: © Roan de Vries
Dream It
