New in Athens? Come build something with strangers.

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.

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, so you are not the one person in the room who can't follow. Teams come out of the bowl, so you end up sitting with Greek students without having to engineer it. That is worth more than the project.

It's also the weekend before Erasmus Days, which run 12 to 17 October. If your ESN calendar is empty that Saturday, this fills it.

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.

Galatsi is a neighbourhood just north of the centre, above Kypseli. The Community Centre is at Vassou 5, Galatsi 111 46, a bus ride from the centre. The stop and a walking route go in the Instagram group the week before.

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.