Code, Chaos, and Community: What I Learned Building a Global Quantum Hackathon from Scratch

This is a guest post by Nafisa Shamim Rafa, Project Manager at Girls in Quantum and lead organizer of the Q-Volution 2026 hackathon. Unitary Foundation is proud to have been a fiscal sponsor of the event.

Building Our Own Room: The Vision Behind GiQ

Girls in Quantum (GiQ) really started with a simple but powerful goal: closing the gender gap in quantum computing and helping the next generation of women find their place in this field. From that foundation, Q-Volution grew naturally - starting as a way to bring students together to learn from each other and collaborate, and eventually evolving into our inaugural global hackathon held from February 23 to March 3, 2026.

If you ask me how I got involved, or why I chose to take on this organizational role, the honest answer comes from something many women in STEM experience at some point: being allowed into the room, but not truly seen once you’re there. Early in my engineering journey, I found myself doing a lot of the heavy technical work behind the scenes, only to be overlooked when it came time to present or take credit. It creates this strange feeling of being included, but not fully accepted - as if you’re present, but not really recognized as a peer or a leader.

When I shifted my focus toward quantum computing, combining my interests in physics and computer science, I hit a different kind of wall. Some people questioned why an initiative like Girls in Quantum even needed to exist, entirely blind to the glaring gender disparity right in front of them. I understood then that it wasn’t only about being invisible in the room; it was dealing with people who didn’t even believe the room had a gender problem to begin with.

Taking on the role of Lead Organizer was a response to all of that. I realized that if we want to change the pattern of female underrepresentation in tech, it is not really wise to just wait for permission or hope for inclusion. We have to build the spaces ourselves. And with the Q-Volution Hackathon, my goal was to make sure it wasn’t just a hackathon “for girls,” but a truly world-class, deeply technical event, one that’s undeniably built by them.

Engineering the Foundation: The 5-Month Road to Q-Volution

Right after the Q-Volution Conference last year, which took place from July 25 to August 1, Girls in Quantum ran a survey to understand how we could improve the quality of the program. A lot of responses emphasized that more hands-on experience would be helpful, and naturally, that immediately led to the ideation of the hackathon. It was obvious that a high-quality event takes a while to plan and execute. Of course, the aim was to attract as many nerds as possible, but I also really wanted this hackathon to be festive, fun, and memorable. From that line of reasoning, a bootcamp week followed by a sprint weekend that is open to participants from all education levels made sense. But I needed advice on how to polish that vision.

The planning process really took off in September when I attended the Quantum.Tech Conference in Europe with my GiQ teammates, Sophia Guertler and Diya Nair. I received a lot of helpful advice and found crucial sponsorship leads at the event. I started writing and designing the sponsorship prospectus right after returning from the trip, making sure to reach out to every possible lead with a convincing proposal. I felt incredibly lucky to receive immediate and enthusiastic support from Angela Chen, Senior Quantum Engineer at Rigetti Computing, and Samuel Horsch, Quantum Applications Architect at Quandela (both of whom are also advisors to GiQ). They championed this hackathon within their respective companies and really laid the foundation for everything that followed. Similarly, I thank all my lucky stars that I met Zhanet Zaharieva, COO and Co-Founder of Quantum Dice, at the conference. She went above and beyond to help facilitate partnerships and was always there to offer valuable advice. I am also deeply thankful to Helen Fullerton, Head of People and Culture, and Marco Palumbo, Director of Business Development, at Infleqtion UK, who prepared and coordinated the sponsor talk, as well as Aya Back (Product Marketing Manager) and Adam Gitter (Technical Lead, Academic Engagements) at Classiq, who championed the Classiq track. I feel the need to mention all these names, especially the women, in detail because I don’t think I could have planned this without their excellent support. They were extremely patient throughout the hundreds of emails and weekly meetings over the five months it took to truly establish the infrastructure of the hackathon.

Of course, being the lead organizer meant that I had to keep an eye out for all major and minor logistical challenges, coming up with quick, creative solutions on the fly.

As the scale of this event grew to include high-tier corporate sponsors, there was a need for a more robust financial infrastructure to manage international sponsorships. I felt very lucky when Veena and Ben from the Unitary Foundation agreed to support this initiative as our fiscal host. I have a particular soft spot for UF because I really owe this community (and the open-source projects they host) for my own quantum software development skills. I learned so much navigating the complexities of corporate partnerships - writing MoUs, managing W-9 forms, creating invoices, and ensuring complete financial transparency across all boards using shared tracking systems, all with Veena’s constant and incredible support.

Another immense challenge was managing the sheer volume of interest while maintaining the high caliber of the event. I designed the registration form and personally invited over 700 past Q-Volution Conference participants to apply. From there, I took ownership of meticulously evaluating over 600 applications, eventually finalizing a cohort of over 200 exceptional participants. I also sourced and convinced technical and VIP judges to join us, keeping them updated with all necessary materials. Once the participants were selected, I managed the daily communications, sending what felt like a thousand emails to ensure everyone had the information they needed, especially those who required a bit more handholding when it came to things like team formation. I also had to onboard each participant in the Discord server and served as the sole moderator leading up to and throughout the event.

I definitely lost sleep and a couple of hair strands navigating these challenges, but there was so much that was exciting about the planning process. It was exciting to design the customized challenge statement briefs for each sponsor, create Google Doc templates for all sponsor communications, extract all the relevant resources, and build a well-documented GitHub repository from scratch. Coding the hackathon website, including tweaking the “CatBot” to answer hackathon-specific questions, and designing the event graphics, speaker banners, and handbooks made every day a new learning experience.

Event planning advice: Document everything carefully in the months leading up to a global event, and be prepared to adapt your infrastructure immediately as your event scales!

Digital Air Traffic Control: Managing the Complexity of Q-Volution

From our massive pool of applicants, we welcomed over 200 active participants from 35+ countries who formed a little over 50 highly dedicated teams (with very interesting team names, for example, “The Fifth Harmony Blochbusters”). Before the sprint weekend could begin, we hosted a bootcamp week led entirely by brilliant women in the quantum ecosystem. We had Maria Salatino (Senior Cryogenic and Mechanical Engineer at Rigetti, and if you Google “CMB Artisan,” she’s right at the top!) sharing her STEM journey. Cassandre Notton from Quandela held a fantastic workshop on quantum machine learning with MerLin, and Gloria Clausen from Infleqtion UK gave a session where she managed to explain quantum computing with neutral atoms in such an intuitive way that it quickly became a crowd favorite.

Behind the scenes, I really felt like I was playing the role of a digital air traffic controller. I was scheduling Calendar events for every speaker, configuring Zoom sessions, carefully routing streams to YouTube, and customizing banners. Once we went live, running an event of this scale was a wild ride. The enthusiasm was so off the charts that we actually gave the Aqora platform a bit of a “hug of death,” briefly crashing it with our web traffic! Over on Discord, on kickoff day, it took me about six hours of double and triple-checking to manually assign track-specific roles. At some point some “overly enthusiastic bots” triggered a temporary suspension of our main GitHub repository, so I had to spin up a backup account and rebuild our resources from scratch while sorting out the restoration of the original.

When you have 200+ brilliant nerds hacking away, the help desk questions flood in like a tidal wave. I stepped in to field as many of the detailed track questions regarding the Rigetti, Quandela, and Classiq SDKs as my bandwidth would allow. We also had to navigate delicate, multi-way communications when the Classiq platform experienced unexpected downtime due to tragic geopolitical events breaking out, and I am so grateful to Aya and Milena for their prompt support in securing solutions before the project submission deadlines.

The event felt like a success once I read the social media posts by the participants and winners about how they truly enjoyed the experience and how rewarding it was, and that they got to learn something new through the projects they worked on (isn’t that the whole point?)

Advice from the Control Tower: Expect your platforms to crash, expect your inbox to overflow, and remember to stay calm. I believe that resolving these inevitable crises with grace is what defines true leadership!

The Village Behind the Hackathon

You simply cannot run a deeply technical quantum hackathon without an army of brilliant mentors and judges. We had participants literally working on a Rigetti challenge based on a paper authored by one of our very own technical judges, Maxime Dupont! He, alongside Tyler Wilson and Yuvraj Mohan, provided incredible support for the Rigetti track. Meanwhile, Yann Beaujeault-Taudière and Amine Souiri evaluated projects for not one, but two tracks. I am also grateful to Hugo Izadi, who mentored for us while simultaneously juggling the QPFL hackathon, and Rishikesh Gokhale and Ryan Manley, who carved out time between their own heavy research commitments. And of course, Pierre-Augustin Fehr and Jannes Stubbemann from Aqora, who provided the platform that made it all possible. As for me? I didn’t quite have the audacity to judge the final projects, so I mostly floated around as an avatar, trying my best to answer the technical questions across all tracks while heavily relying on this elite crew.

Then came the Grand Finale, which perfectly aligned with International Women’s Day. If you want proof that women are leading the quantum revolution, you should have seen our speaker lineup. We had an incredible keynote from Dr. Maria Violaris from Oxford Quantum Circuits, alongside a panel featuring Dr. Linsey Rodenbach from NVIDIA, Marta Reina from Quandela (who pulled double duty as a brilliant technical judge!), Arianna Elena Maschietto from QAI Ventures, and Dr. Ivana Kurečić from OIST (whose fantastic blog, HappyTurtleThings, has entirely stolen my heart). Sharing the virtual stage with these powerhouse scientists and ecosystem builders was an absolute privilege for me.

But speaking of technical mentorship, I absolutely have to shine a massive spotlight on Arife from the GiQ Team. Arife is a high school senior, a brilliant Syrian student living in Turkey. Not only did she help me ideate and revise the overarching hackathon structure through many phases during the planning process, but she also single-handedly hosted a Classiq watch party during the event. She took a dense technical paper and broke it down in detail to explain to participants exactly how to navigate the Classiq track. She provided invaluable technical help throughout the weekend and then stayed on to evaluate the final projects alongside our judges, and I was amazed at her ability to ensure rigorous quality control. It is no wonder she just secured a spot at Ivy Leagues this year!

Thank you to all of the people who helped hold up and shape this event. I look forward to working with you again next year!

Building the Stage: Final Lessons and Next Chapters

If I had to boil down my overall recommendations for other student hackathon organizers, it would be this: embrace the chaos, document everything, and take deep ownership of your initiatives. You will learn much more about crisis management, partner relations, and technical infrastructure in a few months of planning a global event than you might in years of traditional study. More importantly, if you don’t see a space that represents you, build it yourself. Don’t wait for an invitation to the room, and do the heavy lifting required to build the entire stage!

Of course, no one builds a stage entirely alone. A massive thank you once again to our sponsors and advisors - Rigetti, Quantum Dice, Quandela, Classiq, Infleqtion UK, and Aqora - who truly championed this initiative, and to my peers on the GiQ team - Arife, Felipe, Astha, Dhruv, Diya Sophia, Nidhi, Elisa, Maria. - for everything they contributed along the way. A very special shoutout to Veena Vijayakumar and the Unitary Foundation not only for mentoring me through the complex financial logistics but also for providing me with this very platform to share this story.

As for what is coming up for GiQ, the team is excited to continue expanding our educational resources, hosting more collaborative events, and finding new ways to make quantum computing accessible to girls worldwide.

As for what I am doing next? Now that the final project evaluations are complete, the prize money has been successfully distributed to our track winners, and the sponsor-signed certificates have finally hit everyone’s inboxes, I am officially taking a breath! Moving forward, I am excited to carry these hard-earned technical and executive leadership lessons into my next endeavor in the quantum computing space. Most importantly, I’ll be stepping into that next chapter with the absolute certainty that women don’t just belong in the picture, we have the power to direct the whole show!