Reproducible, scalable, and portable data-analysis pipelines are now a fundamental prerequisite for modern data analysis research across all research domains. Snakemake has emerged as one of the most widely adopted systems for declarative pipeline orchestration, combining a concise Python-based DSL with native support for containers, cloud back-ends, and fine-grained provenance tracking, and it underpins thousands of published studies. Nonetheless, the platform’s continued evolution faces several open challenges: improving core performance on heterogeneous high-performance-computing (HPC) resources, extending the plugin architecture for domain-specific extensions, and lowering the entry barrier for novice users while preserving full reproducibility.Here we report on the Snakemake Hackathon 2026, convened in Munich, Germany (9–13 March 2026) with more than 40 participants representing academia, industry, and national-level research infrastructure.