From Prompt to Production: The GitHub Copilot Hackathon

Spend a Day Building with SoftwareOne, Microsoft, and GitHub

A one-day, hands-on hackathon for engineers who want to push GitHub Copilot past the autocomplete demos and find out what it actually does to their workflow. You'll work in small teams on real problems - the kind of work that clogs up your sprint board on a normal week. Two themes, your pick: Productivity & Automation or Collaboration & Teamwork. Pick a challenge, fork the starter repo, and ship something that runs by 4pm.

Mentors from GitHub, Microsoft, and SoftwareOne are in the room all day. Use them. Bring the bug you can't crack, the prompt that won't behave, the agent workflow you've been meaning to try. This is the day to do it.

You'll leave with working code in your own org, a set of prompt patterns that actually earn their keep, and a much better answer to "is Copilot worth it for our team?"

Agenda

Session Title	Session Description
Welcome & Kickoff	Quick intros, the rules of the day, the two challenge themes, and how mentoring works. Coffee on the table.
Copilot Deep Dive: Chat, Edit, Agents	Hands-on walkthrough of the bits that matter - chat, inline edit, agent mode, and the prompt patterns that get past the generic suggestions. Every team leaves this session with a forked starter repo and Codespace running.
Build Session One — Productivity & Automation	Pick a challenge: automate the repetitive coding tasks no one wants, build a bot that writes useful PR descriptions, or wire up smarter CI/CD pipeline notifications. Heads-down build time, mentors circulating.
Lunch & Mentor Office Hours	Working lunch. Drop in on office hours with the GitHub, Microsoft, and SoftwareOne engineers - bring the gnarly stuff: agent design, custom instructions, MCP servers, governance, whatever's on your mind.
Build Session Two — Collaboration & Teamwork	Switch theme or stay on yours. Challenges include a team dashboard for project progress, a GitHub-to-Slack/Teams integration that doesn't just spam the channel, or a shared knowledge hub for the code patterns your team keeps reinventing.;
Demos & Judging	Three minutes per team. Show what you built, show the prompts and patterns that got you there, show the bits where Copilot saved you and the bits where it didn't. Judges score on technical execution, creativity, usefulness, and demo quality.
Awards & What's Next	Awards for the standout builds, plus a short closing on the resources, repos, and patterns to take back to your team.

Why Attend

• Build, don't watch You'll spend most of the day in your editor, not in slides. The point is working code in your own GitHub org by the end of the day - not a thought-leadership take on AI.
• Mentors who've actually shipped this stuff Engineers from GitHub, Microsoft, and SoftwareOne are in the room the entire time. They're not gatekeeping - pull them over when you're stuck, when something's behaving weirdly, or when you just want a second opinion on a prompt.
• Patterns you can use Monday morning Walk away with prompt patterns, custom instructions, agent workflows, and a starter repo that all transfer straight back to your day job. Plus a short writeup of what worked for your team and what didn't.
• Talk to engineers wrestling with the same problems Everyone in the room is figuring out where AI-assisted dev fits in real codebases. The hallway conversations are half the value - bring questions, swap notes, find out how other teams are solving the things you're stuck on.

What to Bring / Prerequisites

• A laptop you can develop on Your usual development machine, with VS Code instaled and admin rights to instal extensions. If you'd rather not configure locally, GitHub Codespaces will be available on the day - just bring something that runs a modern browser.
• A GitHub account Personal or work account is fine. We'll provision Copilot access for the day, so no Copilot licence required up-front. If your organisation already has Copilot deployed and you'd like to use your existing account, that works too.
• Working familiarity with Git and at least one language Comfortable with branches, commits, and pull requests. Any mainstream language is fine - JavaScript / TypeScript, Python, C#, Java, Go. The challenges don't favour one stack over another.
• A problem you'd like to bring (optional, but encouraged) The teams that get the most out of the day usually arrive with a small, specific challenge from their day-to-day work - a script they keep rewriting, a workflow that's clunky, a tool they've been meaning to build.