Announcing the Bharat Builds Tour

We've been building this community for years, and today we're announcing the biggest thing we've done yet.

The Bharat Builds Tour is a hackathon tour running September to December 2026, in collaboration with AWS. It's a season of building alongside AWS mentors, learning tools you'll actually use, and meeting builders from across the country. Six cities host the in-person weekends, but you don't need to be in any of them: every event is hybrid, and online participation is open to students across India. Same problem statements, same mentors, same judging, wherever you're building from.

And yes, there's ₹1 crore in prizes across the tour, plus fast-tracked hiring conversations for internship and full-time roles at Amazon for the top projects. The full rules are here.

But before we talk about any of that, let's talk about you.

Getting into cloud and AI feels overwhelming. We know.

You've seen the job posts. Cloud. GenAI. MLOps. Everything you're "supposed" to know keeps growing, and the tutorials never end. You watch, you take notes, you bookmark things you'll never open again. And somehow you still haven't built anything real.

Here's what nobody tells you: the gap between watching and building doesn't close by watching more.

It closes the first time you deploy something and it breaks. The first time a mentor looks at your architecture and asks a question you hadn't thought of. The first time you ship something at 2am with three teammates and it actually works. That's when it stops being intimidating and starts being yours.

That's what this tour is. Not another webinar. A place to learn by doing, with people who do this for a living sitting next to you.

Every AI product you've used runs on the cloud. That's not a coincidence.

Everyone's talking about AI right now. Fewer people are talking about what's underneath it: the compute, the storage, the infrastructure that makes a model actually usable by a real person. That's cloud. It was the layer everyone needed before AI got interesting, and now that AI is the thing everyone's building, it's needed more than ever.

This isn't cloud instead of AI, or AI instead of cloud. It's both, together, because that's how it actually gets built. You can't ship a GenAI product without somewhere to run it, data to feed it, and a way to scale it past your laptop. That's the whole game right now, and it's exactly what every event on this tour is built around.

So whatever you build here, you're not learning a niche skill. You're learning the thing that sits underneath everything happening in tech right now.

Working with a hyperscaler shouldn't be complicated for a student

AWS runs a huge share of the world's cloud. As a student, that can feel like something you'll get access to "later", after the degree, after the job, after someone gives you permission.

We think that's backwards. So on this tour:

You learn from industry experts, directly. AWS mentors and solutions architects run workshops before every event and support teams through every weekend. These are people who build cloud and AI systems every day. Ask them anything. That's what they're there for.

You build with real tools. Teams that deploy on AWS get free credits, and there's a full track you can complete without an AWS account at all. Either way, you'll work with the same cloud and AI tools companies use in production, not a sandbox pretending to be one.

You get resources that don't expire on Sunday. Every participant gets full access to the AWS Builder Center community: guides, reference architectures, learning paths, and a community of builders that keeps going long after the event ends. When you're stuck at midnight three weeks later, this is where you go.

You leave with people, not just a project. A room full of builders from your city, mentors who've seen your work, and a network across six cities of people who were there too. Ask anyone who's been in this industry a while: the network is the career.

You get proof, not just experience. Every participant walks away with a certificate to show for it, on LinkedIn, in interviews, wherever you need to prove you did the work. And the standout projects from each city get showcased in the official AWS community, in front of the people building this industry.

And yes, it's genuinely fun. Swag, food, late-night energy, a room full of people as into this as you are. Hackathons hit different when you're building something real with people who get it.

The ₹1 crore makes the weekend exciting. The skills, the mentors, the certificate, and the people are what you'll still have next year.

Your home base for the whole tour: the AWS Builder Center

Everything on this tour runs through the AWS Builder Center, and it's worth knowing what that actually gets you. It's free, it takes one email to sign up, and no credit card is needed. Here's how you'll use it:

Learn before the clock starts. Hundreds of hands-on workshops and free courses, from beginner to expert, on everything from serverless to Bedrock. There are even free sandbox environments, pre-provisioned, that let you practise without setting up anything or paying anyone.

Publish your work where it counts. After each event, you'll write up your project as a technical blog on the Builder Center. That post lives on a public profile with your own URL, visible to recruiters, mentors, and the wider AWS community. Top projects from each city get featured. Your hackathon weekend becomes a portfolio piece.

Earn badges as you go. The Builder Center awards community badges for what you do there: publishing articles, completing challenges, staying active, engaging with other builders. Stack them across six events and your profile tells the story of your whole tour. It's the kind of visible, verifiable progress that a certificate alone can't show.

Stay connected after the tour. The community doesn't pack up when we do. User Groups, Student Builder Groups, and the builders you met along the way are all there, and so is the path to bigger things like the AWS Community Builders program.

Register once at wemakedevs.org/aws, create your Builder ID, and all of this is yours from day one, whether you ever attend in person or not.

The first hackathon: First Commit

Every project starts with a first commit. This is the tour's: four days of building with AWS mentors, online from anywhere in India September 17 to 20, and in person in Bengaluru on September 19 at Polaris Institute.

Six stops, September to December. We're kicking off in Bengaluru with the First Commit hackathon, and each city after that gets announced as the tour moves. Wherever you are, stay registered. Your city might be next.

Expect incredible speakers and mentors, swag to take home, and ₹20 lakh in prizes for First Commit.

Online is not the backup plan. It's half the tour.

Every event on this tour runs fully online, nationwide, with no cap. Here's how it works:

Same hackathon, same clock. Each event runs Thursday to Sunday. Online participants get the same theme, the same kickoff, the same deadline as the room.

Same mentors. AWS mentors and solutions architects run online sessions and support online teams through the weekend, not just the people in the venue.

Same judging, same prizes. Online submissions go through the same process as in-person ones, and online winners are announced on the same stage. There is prize money reserved for the online cohort at every single event.

No AWS account needed to compete. There's a full track built entirely on tools that need no AWS account and no card: you build locally, then submit a repo, a demo video, and a writeup. Teams that do want to deploy on AWS opt into the deploy track and get free credits.

All you need is a laptop, an internet connection, and a free AWS Builder Center account. If you're in a host city, apply for an in-person seat if you want the room. If you're not, you've lost nothing: builders from anywhere in India have the same shot at every prize.

How it works

Register once, at wemakedevs.org/aws. One signup covers the whole tour.

Pick your weekends. Join one event or all six, from anywhere in India. You form a new team for each event, so you can build with different people every time, or go solo. Your progress follows you across the tour.

Want to be in the room? Each city hosts 500 builders on-site for the weekend. Apply ahead; priority goes to returning participants from earlier stops. Didn't get a seat, or not in a host city? You're still fully in the hackathon online.

Don't worry about being prepared. Online workshops run the week before each event to get you up to speed, and hands-on workshops with AWS experts happen during the event itself. Register and you'll get reminders before everything starts.

You don't need to be ready. You need to start.

If you've never shipped anything outside a college assignment, this is for you. If you've been building side projects for years and want to go deeper into cloud and AI, this is for you too.

Nobody at these events was born knowing this stuff. Every mentor who'll support you was once exactly where you are: curious, slightly overwhelmed, and one project away from it all making sense.

This is that project. Come find out what you can build. See you there.

The Bharat Builds Tour is a hybrid hackathon tour organised by WeMakeDevs in collaboration with AWS, built around the AWS Builder Center. A student-only hackathon tour, open to students across India.