What does it take to win an Amazon hackathon and turn your development skills into a 6-month internship?

I sat down with team HackOGs, one of the winning teams at Amazon HackOn, to find out.

In this episode:
🛠️ Their experience with hackathons so far
🏆 The strategies that helped them win
🎯 Tips for students who want to get started
⚖️ How they balance hackathons with college life
🔄 What to do if you're not from a computer science background

Watch: https://x.com/kunalstwt/status/2098401167734665594
Got questions? Leave those in the comments.

Every student needs a home base of resources, and for Bharat Build Tour that's AWS Builder Center. It's FREE, no credit card needed, and takes about two minutes to sign up.

Once you're verified as a student, you unlock hands-on AWS workshops, $100 in AWS credits, free 8-hour sandbox environments to experiment in without needing your own AWS account, curated learning paths, and a public builder profile.

Set this up before 17th to get straight into building for the First Commit hackathon: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws/first-commit

Hey everyone ❤️

Thanks for being part of this community. We're growing fast and there's a lot coming your way.

Today I want to talk about judging ✅

We're launching a new judging portal on Monday. Scores, comments, and who all the judges are, everything publicly visible in one place. We've built our own SaaS platform for this, moving away from Google Sheets, so the whole process is way more streamlined going forward.

All projects are already up on our website. For our previous events, judging was done by our sponsors, we'll also be uploading their scores and comments on why those projects won, so you can go check those out.

We're also opening a feedback portal on our website. If you've got thoughts on how we can make events better, we want them.

The website is now home for everything, projects, judging, scores, feedback. Discord stays our space for the community and for talking to you directly.

Thanks for building with us. A lot more is coming.

10,000+ students have already registered for the Bharat Builds Tour, India’s largest nationwide student hackathon series, in collaboration with AWS Builder Center 🇮🇳

We’re bringing incredible opportunities to students across India with prizes worth ₹1 crore, fast-track interview opportunities with Amazon, the chance to build alongside AWS Developers.

First Commit, the first offline edition of the Bharat Builds Tour, is happening on 19th September in Bengaluru.

Register NOW at https://luma.com/first-commit

20 LAKHS worth in prizes for First Commit Hackathon, part of the Bharat Builds Tour.

- Ship It, first prize: 2 lakh cash + $3,000 in AWS credits
- Build It, second prize: 1.5 lakh cash + $2,000 in AWS credits
- Best UI, third prize: 1 lakh cash + $3,000 in AWS credits

Top projects gets a fast-tracked interview at Amazon, for full-time roles and internships both.

Bring your idea, your team, and your laptop. Build something real, ship it, and see where it takes you: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws/first-commit

In Bangalore? Join us in-person: https://luma.com/first-commit

We're hiring a technical writer at WeMakeDevs, part-time and paid.

Looking for someone who writes solid technical blogs, has actually used cloud providers hands-on, can pick up new dev and AI tools without much hand-holding, and genuinely likes explaining things to other people.

If that sounds like you, email a few of your technical articles to kunal@wemakedevs.org.

🚨 The Rote Playoffs Hackathon winners are here!

🥇 1st Position (Apple MacBook Pro): Zeyu Sun
🥈 2nd Position (Apple iPad): Stephen Sookra
🥉 3rd Position (Apple iPhone 17): Aryan Gorde
🎖 Runner-ups (Apple Watch): Jayanth Koppala & Ashtika Singh

Huge congratulations to all five of you, and to everyone who submitted a project.

Big thanks to Modiqo for backing this hackathon and making a prize pool this good possible.

60 students get fast-tracked to interviews for 6-month internships and full-time roles at Amazon. No screening round.

Register now: wemakedevs.org/aws

Build with AWS mentors by your side 🤝

Not sure which AWS service to use? Can't decide how much to build so you actually finish? App works on your laptop but breaks once you deploy? Stuck on an IAM error that makes no sense?

You don't have to figure it out alone. Arkodyuti Saha, Manisha Choudhary, Jitesh Udwani, Makendran Gunasekaran, Aman Raj and Brijesh Dubey from AWS will be around all day to help you out.

📅 19th September 2026
📍 Polaris School of Technology, Bangalore

Are you in Bangalore? Join us for the build day on the 19th of September, limited space: https://luma.com/first-commit

2,000+ students have joined the WeMakeDevs Space on AWS Builder Center 🤯

It is a great resource for students who want to learn cloud and AI. As a student, you get free access to:
📚 900+ courses
🧪 Hands-on labs
🎓 Certification vouchers
🛠️ Workshops

Join our space and take part in the Bharat Builds hackathon series, where the top 10 builders at every event get a direct interview with Amazon for internships and full-time roles, skipping the screening round: https://bit.ly/wmd-space

🚨 First Commit hackathon is LIVE. It is the opening stop of the Bharat Builds Tour with AWS, a six stop run of hackathons taking us from September through December, and it starts TODAY.

You build on AWS from anywhere in India over the next four days. There is ₹20 Lakh worth of cash prizes, cloud credits and gadgets on the table, and fast-track hiring at Amazon for internship and full-time roles, terms and conditions on the site.

If you have been meaning to build something on AWS and never got past the planning, this is the weekend for it: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws

For students in Bangalore we have an in-person build day on 19 September at Polaris School of Technology where AWS mentors will be on the floor with you and a hands on GenAI workshop runs alongside: https://luma.com/first-commit

If you are building for the First Commit hackathon, verifying your student status unlocks some great perks that can help you while you build and learn.

Here's what you can unlock:
- 12 months of AWS Skill Builder Premium with 900+ courses, labs, and exam prep worth $449
- AWS certification voucher worth $100
- AWS credit worth $30 by completing badges on AWS Builder Center

Make the most of the First Commit and the resources available to you.

Verify your student status: bit.ly/abc-verify

🚨 Last day to submit your First Commit hackathon project!

📋 Your submission should have:
1️⃣ A public GitHub repo
2️⃣ A YouTube demo video under 3 minutes that shows AWS in action
3️⃣ A short writeup covering how you have used AWS in your project

🔗 Submission CLOSES at 8 PM IST, submit FAST: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws/first-commit/submit

📁 Resources, rules and judging criteria on website: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws/first-commit

Today is the last day to submit your projects for the First Commit hackathon. Here are some tips to help the judges understand your project.

Write detailed answers. Explain the idea, the problem it solves and what the project actually does. If you are in a team, mention who did what.

Record a demo, 3 minutes max. A screen recording or a phone video is fine. Record it before you start the form since uploads take time, and put it on YouTube as unlisted or public.

If you have a live demo, make sure we can open it without signing up.

Be clear about AWS. Which services you used, how you used them, and what feedback you have.

The submission form is live on the event page on our website: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws/first-commit/submit

Good luck!

16,000+ registrations later, the first hackathon of the Bharat Builds Tour has come to an end 🚀

1,400 builders joined us in Bangalore for the in-person Build Day, spending the day building, attending workshops from AWS engineers, getting help from AWS mentors, networking, and meeting other builders.

Thank you to everyone who participated, and to the AWS mentors and engineers who spent the day helping teams with their projects.

That was First Commit. Register for the Bharat Builds Tour because there’s a lot more coming 🔗: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws

An AI agent was told "always ask before acting." It deleted her inbox anyway and ignored every stop command!

Here's the fix that actually works: https://fandf.co/4qQz5aS

We're hiring a video editor at WeMakeDevs 🎥

Looking for someone who has edited Reels, Shorts, or YouTube videos before, is comfortable working with event and hackathon footage, and understands what developers actually enjoy watching.

If that sounds like you, send your best work to hiring@wemakedevs.org

One config file took down a big chunk of the internet last November, and the code that crashed was doing exactly what it was written to do.

Great read on why runtime is where your code actually tells the truth, especially now that we're shipping faster with AI: https://fandf.co/46e5Wx7

The Bharat Builds First Commit hackathon blog winners are here! 🏆

Here are the 5 winning blogs:
🥇 Kavyan Hembrom - The Timetable Nobody Has

🥇 Arnav Bhandari - KavachPay: Building a financial control plane for autonomous AI agents on AWS

🥇 Souvik Ghosh - From “Apply for Me” to a Submission Receipt: Building Career Agent on AWS

🥇 Jeevesh Chaurasiya - VaporTrace: Real-Time Distributed Tracing for AWS Event Pipelines

🥇 Lakshaya Sharma - Break your rig before you buy it: simulating local AI clusters, then deploying them on AWS

Each winner takes home a Logitech gaming keyboard 🎉

Congratulations to all five winners 🎉

Register for the next Bharat Builds hackathon: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws/env

The Bharat Builds First Commit hackathon runner-up winners are here! 🏆

Four winners stood out with what they built during the hackathon, and each winner takes $1,000 in AWS credits.

Here are the runner-up winners:
🏆 VOXTON - Anushka Salvi, Akshay Nazare, Kamran Pathan, and Sanskar Joshi

🏆 Powerpuff Girls - Divya Anand, Krish Jain, and Shubh Gupta

🏆 Need sleep - Rakshit Chaturvedi, Sai Koushik Reddy, Shiva Sai, and Veerabhadra Yerram

🏆 Mohammed Ali Khan

Congratulations to all four winners and everyone who built and shipped a project during First Commit. 🎉

Register for the next Bharat Builds hackathon 👇
https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws/env

16,000+ participants took part in the Bharat Builds Tour First Commit Hackathon and 3 teams came out on top 🚀

Congratulations to all the winners, and thank you to everyone who spent these four days building, learning, and bringing their ideas to life.

Here are the winners across the three tracks:
🚀 Ship It Winner: Team StarBugs - Naomi Pereira, Harshendra M & Shashwath Prabhu

🛠️ Build It Winner: Prashant Thakur

🎨 Best UI Winner: Team 3 Builds - Abhishek M Shivanagoudar, Akshay R & Afreen Hossain

This was just the first stop. Register for the next Bharat Builds hackathon: https://www.wemakedevs.org/aws/env