Meet Dylan, a software engineer at Amazon who's been part of nearly 60 hackathons as a hacker, mentor, and judge.
Dylan Vu's first hackathon was 36 hours long. He wrote maybe 50 lines of code. But those 50 lines taught him what an API was, how Git works, and what it's like to build something with other people. He liked it enough to come back the next month, and the month after that. By the time he graduated in 2024, he'd done about 30 hackathons, building everything from web apps to robots to a haptic feedback Bluetooth suit.
Today, Dylan is a software engineer at Amazon, about a year and a half in. He doesn't compete anymore, but he hasn't left the hackathon world. He's mentored at nearly 23 events since graduating and occasionally judges. Between hacking and mentoring, he's been part of close to 60 hackathons, and the skills he picked up at them are still the foundation of how he works every day.
Every hackathon team ends up with informal roles. Dylan saw his role as being like the anchor of a relay race: the person who, at the final stretch, pulls everyone's code together. While his teammates built their individual pieces, Dylan had to read code he didn't write, figure out how it worked, and stitch it all into one functioning product before time ran out.
"The biggest thing that hackathons have taught me that has helped me out in my career is really the ability to debug not only my code but other people's code. I may not know the exact specifics of how they work, but I know how they fit together in the big picture."
That turned out to be the most career-relevant skill hackathons gave him. At Amazon, his coworkers have noticed he thinks about systems in a way that goes beyond just writing code—seeing how components connect across a larger architecture. Dylan learned that out of necessity, on weekends where four people's code had to ship as one product by Sunday morning.
Before every hackathon, Dylan made himself a promise: he'd learn at least one new technology during the event. First hackathon, APIs. Second, databases. Each weekend added a layer, and the knowledge stacked up.
"You're committed to sitting there to build something, and why not just use that same weekend to learn something new?"
He didn't wait until he felt ready for a new tool. The hackathon was the forcing function. By his 20th event, he had exposure to tools and frameworks that would've taken years to pick up through coursework alone.
Dylan's advice on pitching is simple. Convince the judge that a problem exists, show what people currently do about it, then explain why your solution is better.
"The first step of my ‘three-step plan’ is to convince the judge that there is a problem. The second one is to say what people are doing right now. And the third one is to talk about how you come in and how you are better than the existing status quo."
He also thinks the best projects tend to mix technologies. Hardware plus web plus AI plus mobile—the more elements you combine, the more the project grabs attention. But the pitch is what seals it.
Dylan Vu is a software engineer at Amazon. He graduated in 2024 and has been part of nearly 60 hackathons as a hacker, mentor, and judge.
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