// 48-hour build weekend · march 20–22, 2026 · austin, tx + remote
$ ship something real in 48 hours▊
One weekend. Six tracks. $42,000 in prizes. Green Build is a hackathon for students and indie builders who live in their editors — no pitch decks, no vaporware, just working code and a demo that runs. Bring a team or find one at the door.
registration closes in
$ ./whoami
A hackathon that respects your terminal.
Green Build started in a university lab in 2019 with 40 people and a shared urn of coffee. Seven editions later it's the largest independent student-and-indie hackathon in the Southwest — and we've kept the same rule: you demo working software or you don't demo at all.
No cost to enter. Meals, mentors, hardware, and a very loud playlist are on us. Whether you're shipping your first repo or your fiftieth, you'll leave with something that runs.
$ ls ./tracks
Six tracks. Pick one, or defy us.
Every project competes in one track for the track prize, plus the overall Grand Build award. Sponsor bounties stack on top.
- >[ai]
AI & Agents
LLM apps, autonomous agents, retrieval, eval harnesses. If it reasons or hallucinates, it lives here.
- >[devtools]
Developer Tools
CLIs, extensions, linters, CI tricks, anything that makes the person next to you faster.
- >[hardware]
Hardware & IoT
Microcontrollers, sensors, robots, soldering irons. A hardware lab is open all weekend.
- >[good]
Social Good
Civic tech, accessibility, climate, health. Ship something that helps a real person.
- >[games]
Games & Graphics
Engines, shaders, weird web toys, jam-scale games. Playable beats polished.
- >[wildcard]
Wildcard
Doesn't fit a box? Good. The most gleefully unclassifiable build wins here.
$ cat prizes.txt
$42,000 on the table.
$ grand_build
Grand Build
$15,000
Best overall project across all tracks, plus a mentorship call with each judge and a demo slot at Southwest Dev Summit.
Track Winners
$3,000
First place in each of the six tracks. $18,000 total. Every team is automatically entered for the track they registered under.
$ bounties
Sponsor Bounties
$9,000
Best use of a sponsor API, hardware, or SDK. Stackable — one project can win a track and multiple bounties.
| award | cash | extras |
|---|---|---|
| Best Beginner Hack | $1,000 | Mechanical keyboards for the whole team |
| People's Choice | $1,000 | Voted live by every attendee at demos |
| Cleanest Commit History | $500 | Yes, we read your git log. Sorry. |
$ tail -f schedule.log
48 hours, minute by minute.
// FRI · MARCH 20 — day 00
- 17:00Doors open · check-in, badge pickup, dinner #1
- 19:00Opening ceremony + sponsor lightning talks
- 20:00HACKING BEGINS · clock starts, team formation mixer
- 22:30Workshop: shipping an API in 30 minutes
// SAT · MARCH 21 — day 01
- 02:00Midnight ramen run + lo-fi DJ set
- 09:00Breakfast + mentor office hours open
- 13:00Workshop: fine-tuning small models on a laptop
- 16:00Cup Stacking break + hardware lab demo
- 23:59T-minus 20 hours · submit early, sleep later
// SUN · MARCH 22 — day 02
- 08:00SUBMISSIONS CLOSE · hard freeze, git push or die
- 09:30Science-fair demos · judges walk the floor
- 12:30Finalist stage demos (top 8)
- 14:00AWARDS · closing ceremony + group photo
$ whoami --judges
Who's grading your build.
Priya Raman
Principal Eng, Ledgerloop
Distributed systems, ex-maintainer of two databases you've probably run.
Marcus Okafor
Founder, Sonata AI
Bootstrapped a dev-tools company from a hackathon project. Full circle.
Dev Sharma
OSS Maintainer, forgekit
40k stars, zero patience for a README that doesn't run.
Lena Vogt
Design Eng, Northwind
Judges on craft: does the demo feel good in the first five seconds?
$ cat sponsors/*
Built with the help of.
These teams pay for the pizza, the swag, and the prize pool — and send their engineers as mentors all weekend.
// kernel tier
// runtime tier
// want your logo here? email sponsors@greenbuild.dev — decks in your inbox same day.
$ man green-build
Questions, answered.
Nope. Teams are 1–4 people. Come solo and we'll run a team-formation mixer right after opening ceremony — most solo arrivals leave it with a team. You can also just fly solo the whole weekend.
Free. Zero entry fee. Meals, snacks, drinks, swag, hardware loans, and mentorship are all covered by sponsors. You bring a laptop and a sleeping bag if you want to nap.
Anyone 18+ who can build. Students, self-taught devs, career-changers, and indie hackers all welcome. You do not need to be enrolled anywhere. Beginners have their own prize track.
No. All code must be written during the 48 hours. Boilerplate, open-source libraries, and pre-made design assets are fine — but the core of your project starts when the clock does. Judges check commit timestamps.
Yes. Pick 'Remote' at registration and you'll get a Discord invite, virtual mentor queue, and a live-streamed opening and closing. Remote teams compete for every track and bounty except Hardware.
$ ./register --now
Claim your spot.
600 seats, and last year they went in nine days. Drop your details, pick a track, and we'll email your confirmation and Discord invite within the minute.
- Free entry — all meals & swag included
- In-person in Austin, or fully remote
- Beginners welcome — dedicated prize track
$ registration.sh