The Backlog in Your Head

Date: Friday, February 26, 2026
Time: 4:30 PM – 9:30 PM
Format: Individual

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You Already Know What to Build

There’s something you’ve wanted to fix for months. Maybe it’s a dashboard that should exist. A workflow that wastes twenty minutes of your day. A tool you keep describing to colleagues as “someone should really build this.” A rough idea you’ve sketched on paper or prototyped in your head during a long meeting. It never made it to a sprint. There was always something more urgent. The roadmap had other priorities. You told yourself you’d get to it eventually. This is eventually.

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The Challenge

Build something that makes Awaaz better. That’s the only brief. You’ve spent years inside this product. You know where it creaks. You know what’s missing. You know what would make your own life easier, or a consultant’s day shorter, or a customer’s experience smoother. Now is the time to prove it.

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Why This Format

We want to see how you think, not just how you code. Anyone can execute a spec. The harder skill is identifying what’s worth building in the first place. What problems do you notice that others walk past? What solutions are obvious to you but invisible to everyone else? This hackathon is a window into that.

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How It Works

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Phase 1: Problem Lock-in (First 30 Minutes)

Submit a short write-up covering: Submit the problem statement in general channel. Once you submit, you’re locked in. No pivots. This forces conviction; pick something you genuinely believe in.

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Phase 2: Build (Remaining Time)

After lock-in, you build. Use whatever tools you want:

• Claude Code, Copilot, ChatGPT
• Existing libraries, your old code, open source all fine

This isn’t a test of what you can do without help. It’s a test of what you can ship with everything at your disposal.

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Phase 3: Demo

At the end, you show what you built. No slides. Just your screen and your voice. Show us:

1. The problem (briefly)
2. The solution (this is the main event)
3. Why it matters (land the plane)

If it doesn’t run, it doesn’t count. A working prototype that solves a small problem beats a broken attempt at something ambitious.

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Schedule

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Evaluation Criteria

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What Makes a Good Problem Choice

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Inspiration Corners

You don’t need these. If you already know what you’re building, skip this section entirely. But if you’re staring at a blank page, here are some areas where we know problems exist:

For the engineers who live in the codebase

• What do you debug repeatedly?
• What logs do you wish existed?
• What’s missing from your local dev setup?
• What would make code review faster?

For those who think about call quality

• What patterns indicate a call is going sideways?
• How would you spot a bad agent config before it hits production?
• What would help consultants review calls faster?
• How do we know if a prompt change made things better or worse?

For the systems thinkers

• What should be on a dashboard that isn’t?
• What alerts would have prevented the last incident?
• Where does latency hide?
• What’s the canary that tells us something is off?

For those who talk to customers or hear their pain

• What makes calls feel robotic?
• Where do conversations break down most often?
• What confuses customers that shouldn’t?
• What would make our agents sound more human?

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One Last Thing

This isn’t about proving you can code under pressure. We already know you can. This is about showing us what you see that others don’t. The problem you’ve been carrying around. The solution that’s been forming in the back of your mind. You’ve been waiting for time to build it. Here’s your time.

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