SEASON FINALE — 3 teams left, and only one can win. Can they impress AWS leadership?
The process of building a full product has a few clearly defined requirements, but the vast majority of what makes one product work while another struggles is so vague that entire libraries of books have been written trying to figure it out. What works for one company will fail miserably for the next. A strategy that was surefire last year will backfire today. For a product to succeed, the founders need a combination of good instincts, good execution, and good luck.
In the finale, we’re steering into that ambiguity. No warm-up or Chaos Engineering challenges. No clearly defined outcomes. We just tell the teams that they need to decide how to best present their product to the judges.
Each of the remaining teams has demonstrated that they deserve to be in the finale. They’ve combined their own experience with modern development tooling. They’ve leveraged their development knowledge, agentic workflows, AI-powered IDEs like Kiro, and a whole lot more to get this far — and it all comes down to whether or not they can land the plane.
Host and judges
Host and Judge: Kelsey Hightower, distinguished engineer https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelsey-hightower-849b342b1/ Judge: Jason Lengstorf, creator of CodeTV https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlengstorf/ Judge: Usman Khalid, general manager of Serverless at AWS https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmedusmankhalid/
About this series
Great devs build great projects. But building a great product is about more than the frontend and backend. Kelsey Hightower hosts a competition to find out what it takes to really be a builder.
The Full Stack is a competition reality series presented by Amazon Web Services and produced by CodeTV. 8 teams compete to build a full product, from idea all the way through to production. Each episode presents a new set of challenges to test the builders’ abilities across the entire spectrum of building not just an app, but a business. And every episode, 1 team will miss the mark and go home.
This is not a hackathon. And for these teams, they’ll need a lot more than just code if they hope to win.
More episodes from The Full Stack Season 1
The Full Stack
S1.E3
6 teams remain, and the competition — and their products — are about to get real. They need to ship an MVP to impress the judges, or risk going home.
The Full Stack
S1.E4
5 teams left. This week is UX week. To stay in the game, teams need to show us that they can build products that feel good to use. Function alone won’t cut it — they need to nail form as well.
The Full Stack
S1.E5
4 teams left! They’ve built products that were good enough to keep them in the competition, but if they want to make it to the finale, it’s time to launch.