# First Commit Hackathon Recap and What's Next What students across India built, the projects that won, and how you can join the next stop of the tour powered by AWS Builder Center. Published: October 7, 2026 Author: Kunal Kushwaha Tags: hackathon, aws, wemakedevs Source: https://www.wemakedevs.org/blogs/first-commit-hackathon-recap-and-whats-next --- ![image](images/first-commit-hackathon-recap-and-whats-next/1.webp) The opening stop of Bharat Builds powered by AWS Builder Center event series was the First Commit event in Bengaluru, powered by AWS Builder Center, our six-city student hackathon series. It ran from 17 to 20 September 2026, online across India, with an optional build day at Polaris School of Technology in Bengaluru on Saturday. The theme was open: pick a real problem, one you actually have or see around you, and build something for it. Four days later, builders across India had shipped 1,180 projects and written about how they did it. Here is what happened, what won, and how you can join the next one. ![image](images/first-commit-hackathon-recap-and-whats-next/2.webp) ## Why we are doing this There is a loop that is easy to get stuck in as a student. You watch a tutorial, follow along, feel productive, and start the next one without feeling like you actually learned something. What actually moves you forward is building something real and putting it out in public, where other people can see it and use it. Bharat Builds exists to break that loop, and AWS Builder Center is where it all happens. You join the tour with your Builder Center profile, build with AWS Credits for your team, and publish what you made and how you made it on AWS Builder Center, where it stays as an article linked to your shareable profile. For the strongest projects at every stop, you also have the potential to receive a fast-track interview opportunity with Amazon, so a weekend of building can go a lot further than a certificate. ## What four days looked like 13,667 participants signed up, 4,270 teams formed, and by Sunday night 1,180 projects had been submitted. Many came with a live link you could open and use, not only a repository, and builders wrote about their projects on AWS Builder Center along the way. Some people built solo, some in full teams of four, and every submission was in the running for all three prizes. The theme was open, and a lot of what came back was agents. Beyond that, people built for campus life, disaster response, climate and waste, health, agriculture and accessibility. ## Build day in Bengaluru You could take part in First Commit from anywhere in India. For those who wanted to build in person, we had 1,400+ builders join us for a day at Polaris School of Technology on 19 September, from 8 in the morning to 8 at night. The day started with breakfast and team formation, and teams that had been in Discord threads since Thursday met each other properly for the first time. From the stage, we talked about why we are running this tour and what AWS Builder Center gives you as a student builder. Then AWS mentors ran a hands-on workshop on building AI agents with the Strands Agents SDK, and you could see it in the submissions. Agents were everywhere, including at the top of the board. ![image](images/first-commit-hackathon-recap-and-whats-next/3.webp) The rest of the day was building, with mentors on the floor. The thing you notice in a room like that is how much faster people get unstuck. A problem that would have cost two hours of searching gets solved in five minutes because somebody who has hit it before is sitting two seats away. ![image](images/first-commit-hackathon-recap-and-whats-next/4.webp) ## The winners ## First prize and Ship It track: Suraksha Team StarBugs won ₹2,00,000 in cash and $3,000 in AWS credits for Suraksha, an agentic companion for an aging parent. It is the only one of the three winners built for somebody who is not the user. The person operating the software and the person it looks after are different people, and almost every design decision gets harder once that is true, because the one who needs the help is the one least likely to be holding the phone. [![Suraksha - First Commit Hackathon Submission](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XVr34XeXvlE/hqdefault.jpg)](https://youtu.be/XVr34XeXvlE) ## Second prize and Build It track: Beacon Night Shift Built solo over the weekend under the team name CoffeAndCode, Beacon won ₹1,50,000 and $2,000 in AWS credits. It is an on-call agent for the 3 AM page. Payments are failing, and you need to know whether it is real, what changed, what to do about it, and whether you can go back to sleep. Beacon reads the logs on Amazon Bedrock, finds the change that caused the outage, proposes one fix from an allowlist and dry-runs it, then waits for you to approve it out loud. Say yes to it handling that fault by itself next time, and the second time it fires nobody gets woken up. [![Beacon Night Shift — the on-call agent that fixes the 3 AM page](https://img.youtube.com/vi/a3SxZHvIkCo/maxresdefault.jpg)](https://youtu.be/a3SxZHvIkCo) ## Third prize and Best UI: CampusEvac Team 3 Builds won ₹1,00,000 and $1,000 in AWS credits. Real fire drills are expensive and disruptive, so they rarely happen often enough to build muscle memory, and the ones that do happen only train the person walking out. CampusEvac turns a drill into a two-player game in the browser. One player moves through a smoke-filled building in first person towards the assembly point, while the other watches from overhead, verifies progress, sends route guidance and can clear the smoke when it blocks the way. Neither can finish alone, which is how it ends up training the warden role that drills rarely cover. [![CampusEvac - First Commit Hackathon](https://img.youtube.com/vi/FhgTfCz0ou8/maxresdefault.jpg)](https://youtu.be/FhgTfCz0ou8) ## Runners-up Four more teams took home $1,000 in AWS credits each. Magpie, an AI-native finance workspace, by team Voxton: Anushka Salvi, Akshay Nazare, Kamran Pathan and Sanskar Joshi FreshTrace, by Powerpuff Girls: Rakshit Chaturvedi, Sai Koushik Reddy, Shiva Sai and Veerabhadra Yerram Expressive captions, by Need Sleep: Divya Anand, Krish Jain and Shubh Gupta Factcade, an AI operations copilot for factories, built solo by Mohammed Ali Khan All 1,180 projects, with their repositories and live links, are on the First Commit event page . If you are planning to build at the next stop, go through a few of them first. It is the quickest way to see what a finished four-day project looks like. ## Ten students, now have an opportunity to interview Prizes were not the only outcome. Ten students from the strongest projects at First Commit got the opportunity for fast-track interviews with Amazon, for 6-month internships and full-time roles. That, along with the hands-on building itself, is what we care about most on this tour. What you build over a weekend can put you in the room for an interview, and the same opportunity is open at every stop. The other thing you take home is the community. Through AWS Builder Center, the people you built with stay connected online long after the weekend ends. You can keep sharing what you are working on, learn from what others are building, and stay in touch with builders from across India until the next stop. ## Sharing what they learned, in writing Builders published technical blogs on AWS Builder Center during and after the hackathon, covering architectures, debugging sessions and the things that did not work. The five best each won a Logitech gaming keyboard. Code alone does not tell someone reading it six months later why you built it the way you did. A write-up that explains what you chose, what broke and what you would do differently is the thing that holds up in an interview, and it stays on a public profile that is yours. ## What your AWS Builder Center profile gets you Your Builder Center community profile is more than a login for the tour. It is where your blogs live, where your badges show up, and what you carry with you from one stop to the next. If you are a student, verify your university enrollment on the Builder Center. Once you are verified and complete your profile you can start earning badges to unlock $579 worth of rewards. A year of AWS Skill Builder premium, worth $449, with 900+ courses, hands-on labs and exam prep. This one lands as soon as your student status checks out and you complete your profile picture and about the section. A foundational AWS Certification voucher ($100 USD value), unlocked by the badges on your profile. Up to $30 in AWS credits for real services, earned the same way, badge by badge. If you have not verified yet, do it before the next event so everything is in place when you start building. ## Next stop: Environmental Hacks ![image](images/first-commit-hackathon-recap-and-whats-next/5.webp) The second stop of the tour is Environmental Hacks . It runs online across India from 8 to 11 October, with a build day at Delhi Technological University on 10 October. You can register either solo or in a team of up to four people. This time the brief is to build something that improves the environment, across three tracks: Air, Heat and Water, and Waste and Energy. There is a ₹20 lakh prize pool, and ten students from the strongest projects get a fast-track interview with Amazon. At the build day on 10 October, Kunal Kushwaha , Saiyam Pathak and Piyush Garg will be joining along with AWS mentors to help, guide and give you feedback on your project. You will also get exclusive tour swag and time to network with other builders. If you built at First Commit, you are already in, because one tour registration covers every event. If you did not, this is a good one to start with. You can enter solo, you can build from wherever you are, and you do not need any hackathon experience to start. All it takes is your AWS Builder Center profile. Thank you to AWS and the AWS Builder Center team, to the mentors and judges who gave up their weekend, and to everyone who shipped something. One city down, five to go. See you in Delhi, or online.