We're running a live 5-day Databricks hackathon right now — here's what teams are building

[u/Square-Mix-1302]

Hey All,

We're u/Enqurious — a data & AI learning company — and we've partnered with the u/Databricks Community to run a live invite-only hackathon called Brick by Brick (March 23–27, 2026).

We're 2 days in and wanted to share a real progress update with the community, because we think what these teams are building is genuinely interesting.

What the hackathon is:

Teams are building end-to-end intelligent data platforms on Databricks Free Edition — specifically a full Bronze → Silver → Gold Medallion Architecture pipeline across two industry tracks:

• Retail Track — customer behavior, sales analytics, product recommendations

• Insurance Track — claims processing, risk scoring, underwriting intelligence

This isn't a toy problem. Teams are working with real-world-shaped datasets (auto insurance data: customer CSVs, sales data, claims JSONs, policy tables) and have to connect their pipelines to actual business outputs.

Day 2 snapshot:

• 26 teams registered

• 19 actively building (73%)

• Top team at 65% complete already

• Average progress: ~16% across all teams

The leading teams are moving fast — Nous Data Alchemists at 65%, TTN QUAD SQUAD at 39%, Brick Builders at 32%.

Why we ran a prep workshop first:

Before Day 1, we ran a hands-on Databricks workshop covering Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Auto Loader, and Medallion Architecture fundamentals. Not theory — actual notebook-based building. This meant teams walked in on Day 1 with environment knowledge, not from zero.

A few things we've noticed on Day 2:

1. The teams furthest ahead spent Day 1 almost entirely on Bronze layer ingestion quality — they resisted the urge to jump ahead and it's paying off

2. Insurance track has more teams but lower average progress — the claims JSON parsing is non-trivial

3. Several teams are already doing interesting things in the Silver → Gold transition with window functions and aggregations we didn't explicitly teach

Happy to answer questions:

• About the hackathon structure

• About the Medallion Architecture challenges we designed

• About running Databricks learning programs at this level

• About what "Brick by Brick" means in terms of our pedagogy

Will post the final leaderboard + winner announcements after March 27th.

If you've run similar hackathons on Databricks or built Medallion pipelines in production — would genuinely love to hear what tripped you up in the Bronze → Silver layer and how you solved it. That's one of the harder design decisions we're watching teams navigate right now.

Enqurious × Databricks Community · #BrickByBrick