---
title: "Certification: Build Small Hackathon 2026"
description: "Certificate of participation in Build Small, the Hugging Face × Gradio hackathon dedicated to real, tinkerable apps powered entirely by small, local, open-weight models under 32B parameters — earned by building CXR Draft Auditor."
date: "2026-07-12T07:00:00Z"
last_updated: "2026-07-27"
build_time: "2026-08-26T06:40:15Z"
certification_name: "Build Small Hackathon 2026"
certification_description: "Certificate of participation in Build Small, a Hugging Face × Gradio hackathon celebrating small, local, open-weight models — building real, tinkerable apps powered entirely by models under 32B parameters."
issuing_organization: "Hugging Face"
date_issued: "2026-06-15"
related_skills: ["artificial-intelligence","python","software-development","system-analysis","quality-assurance"]
certifications: ["career-essentials-in-generative-ai-by-microsoft"]
keywords: ["Build Small Hackathon","Hugging Face","Gradio","Small Open-Weight Models","AI Certification"]
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
canonical: "https://www.alexfeel.info/certifications/build-small-hackathon-2026-by-hugging-face/"
---

Build Small was a Hugging Face × Gradio hackathon, held June 5–15, 2026, with a premise I liked immediately: build a real, tinkerable app powered entirely by open-weight models under 32B parameters. No frontier API doing the actual work — small, local models carrying the whole load, with a $48K+ prize pool and a sponsor lineup spanning OpenBMB, Black Forest Labs, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Modal, JetBrains, and Cohere Labs.

My entry was [CXR Draft Auditor](/projects/cxr-draft-auditor/), a research and educational quality-assurance tool that gives a chest X-ray draft impression a transparent second read. Two tiny 4B models — a twice-fine-tuned MedGemma that grounds the image into labeled findings with bounding boxes and an NVIDIA Nemotron-3 Nano 4B that parses the draft into the same labels — feed a deterministic, model-free comparator that does the only judging, and both run inside the [live Hugging Face Space](https://huggingface.co/spaces/build-small-hackathon/cxr-draft-auditor), comfortably within the hackathon's parameter budget.

Small models are usually the compromise; Build Small treated them as the point. Working under a hard sub-32B budget is exactly what pushed the design I ended up most proud of — two narrow models, each doing the one job it is good at, feeding a judgment layer with no model in it at all. The full build story, from the no-PhysioNet data work to the QLoRA fine-tuning to the evaluation-integrity bug that nearly shipped the wrong model, is in my [Field Notes write-up](/blog/building-a-chest-xray-draft-auditor-with-two-4b-models/).

Below is the certificate of participation from the hackathon.

![Build Small Hackathon 2026 Certificate of Participation](https://www.alexfeel.info/certifications/build-small-hackathon-2026-by-hugging-face/Build%20Small%20Hackathon%202026%20Certificate%20of%20Participation.png)
Build Small Hackathon 2026 Certificate of Participation


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