The Road to re:Invent Hackathon: What It Is and How to Watch
50 developers. 10 teams. 1 bus ride from LA to Vegas. No rehearsals, no second chances - just live coding under pressure. Here's how to watch the first-ever Road to re:Invent hackathon live, why it’s unlike any hackathon you’ve seen, and how AWS Heroes + AWS Community Builders are building real apps from a moving vehicle using Kiro and AWS.
This might be the most honest hackathon you’ll ever see! 50 Developers, 10 teams, a 5 hour bus ride from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and $100k up for grabs! By the time they arrive at Midday Madness at AWS re:Invent , each team will (hopefully!) have built and deployed a working app, that they built live on camera from a moving vehicle in the desert.
I still can’t believe we actually got approval to make this hackathon actually happen. And more importantly - I still can’t believe Savannah from the AWS Events team hasn’t blocked me on slack after I kept sending "what if we..." messages over the last few months of planning.
All of the contestants, who are AWS Community Builders and AWS Heroes , will be using Kiro , my favourite agentic IDE. Kiro helps you move fast without breaking things, thanks to spec-driven development, property-based testing, steering files, and custom agents. It’s built for this kind of pressure.
Each team is also integrating at least one AWS service into their app (though I have a feeling most will use a few more than that). We’ll get to see how they balance speed, architecture, and tooling when the clock won’t stop and the bus keeps moving. The contestants have already been thinking about all of this, and I wrote a piece earlier about how these same builders prep using the 4 T’s: Team, Time, Tech, and Thinking.
The teams will spend the drive from LA → LV building their projects. When they arrive at the Midday Madness tent outside Caesars Forum at AWS re:Invent it’s showtime! Each team will demo what they’ve built and make their pitch to the judges, and you can be there to cheer them on.
If you’re at AWS re:Invent, come down to the Midday Madness tent from noon PST on Sunday Nov 30 to rally for your favourite team and catch up with your community before the finale which happens later in the afternoon. If you’re joining from home, you can:
- 📺 Stream live on AWS Twitch (starting 11am PST)
- 🔔 Get livestream notifications: Sign up here
I’ll be on the broadcast desk live at the tent with Farrah Campbell and AM Grobelny , covering the build as it happens, and interviewing some very special guests along the way. Whether you’re joining us in person or on the live stream, you’ll get to see the teams troubleshoot, push last minute fixes, debug their apps in the desert, and bring their wild project ideas to life.
We don’t know what the teams will build yet, but we do know this: there’s no faking a working endpoint on a live stream! It’s just code, time, and a finish line that keeps moving closer.
See you on the stream, in the bus, or in the Midday Madness tent!
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