Erasmus, exchange, expat, just moved
New in Athens? Come build something with strangers.
You arrived in September. You know your flatmates and the person from the ESN welcome day whose name you've forgotten. Here is a Saturday afternoon where you walk in alone and leave with four people's numbers and a thing you made together.
- When
- Sat 10 October 2026, 12:00 to 18:00
- Language
- English, all of it
- Cost
- Free
- Greek needed
- None
- Coding needed
- None
What it is
Commit Athens is a small, free hackathon run by students. At 13:00 names come out of a bowl, five at a time, and those five are your team. You get three hours to build something that runs, using whatever you like, AI tools included. At 16:30 every team shows what it made in four minutes. Then it's over and you go for a coffee with people you didn't know at lunch.
It is not a competition. There are no prizes, judges or sponsors. The full details are here.
Why it works for people who just moved here
Most "meet people" events put fifty strangers in a bar and hope. This one puts you at a table with four of them and gives you a problem to solve by 16:30. You don't have to make conversation. The conversation makes itself, because somebody has to decide whether the button is red.
The whole thing runs in English. Roughly half the room are Greek students, half aren't, and the teams get mixed by the bowl, so you end up with locals on your team without having to engineer it. That is worth more than the project.
It's also the weekend before Erasmus Days, so if your ESN calendar is empty that Saturday, this fills it.
Do I need to be a programmer?
No. About half the room doesn't study computer science. Business, architecture, medicine, law, languages. A team needs someone to pick the idea, someone to draw it, someone to write the words and someone to break it, and AI tools write most of the code now. If you can describe a thing in a sentence, you can build it in an afternoon. Here is what a first hackathon is actually like.
Getting there
Galatsi is a neighbourhood just north of the centre, next to Zografou where NTUA is. The Community Centre is at Vassou 5, Galatsi 111 46, about twenty minutes by bus from the centre. The stop and a walking route go in the Instagram group the week before.
How to come
Join the Instagram group and say you're coming. That's the sign-up. Bring a laptop and a charger, eat first, arrive by 12:30 so you're there for the draw.
Bringing your whole ESN group? Great, but the bowl will split you up. That's the point.