Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
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.
A minimum viable product (MVP) is how we get the product into real users’ hands and start to see how actual people respond to it. A plan rarely survives contact with reality, so keeping these lightweight and easy to modify is key. This is when everything gets real: real feedback from real users on real, working software.
Nailing the “minimum” part is hard. Go too far and you risk overcommitting to a direction that doesn’t hit, but if you don’t go far enough, your users will be underwhelmed.
Presented by @awsdevelopers
## Want to start building on AWS like our contestants?
The Agent Toolkit for AWS gives any MCP-compatible coding agents the tools, knowledge, and guardrails they need to build, deploy, and manage resources on AWS.
Grab the toolkit and start building today aws.amazon.com/products/developer-tools/agent-toolkit-for-aws
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## Host and judges
Host: Kelsey Hightower, distinguished engineer linkedin.com/in/kelsey-hightower-849b342b1
Judge: Jason Lengstorf, creator of CodeTV linkedin.com/in/jlengstorf
Ashley Willis, Sr. Director of Developer Relations at GitHub linkedin.com/in/ashleymcnamara1
## 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.
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CodeTV makes tv for developers. Think of it like a cable tv channel: lots of different series, with different formats and hosts and approaches, but all united in the goal of creating high quality, entertaining content for devs — all dense with technical knowledge, strategic insight, and other valuable information to help you learn something new and grow your career.
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Chapters:
0:00 This is MVP Week on The Full Stack
0:38 Checking in with the teams
0:58 Warm-Up Mini Game
5:04 Chaos Engineering Challenge
7:07 What is a good MVP?
13:32 Chaos Engineering presentations
21:04 Kelsey Hightower team feedback sessions
30:50 Main Challenge demos
39:32 Main Challenge judging and elimination
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.
A minimum viable product (MVP) is how we get the product into real users’ hands and start to see how actual people respond to it. A plan rarely survives contact with reality, so keeping these lightweight and easy to modify is key. This is when everything gets real: real feedback from real users on real, working software.
Nailing the “minimum” part is hard. Go too far and you risk overcommitting to a direction that doesn’t hit, but if you don’t go far enough, your users will be underwhelmed.
Presented by @awsdevelopers
## Want to start building on AWS like our contestants?
The Agent Toolkit for AWS gives any MCP-compatible coding agents the tools, knowledge, and guardrails they need to build, deploy, and manage resources on AWS.
Grab the toolkit and start building today aws.amazon.com/products/developer-tools/agent-toolkit-for-aws
----------------------------------------------------------------------
## Host and judges
Host: Kelsey Hightower, distinguished engineer linkedin.com/in/kelsey-hightower-849b342b1
Judge: Jason Lengstorf, creator of CodeTV linkedin.com/in/jlengstorf
Ashley Willis, Sr. Director of Developer Relations at GitHub linkedin.com/in/ashleymcnamara1
## 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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CodeTV makes tv for developers. Think of it like a cable tv channel: lots of different series, with different formats and hosts and approaches, but all united in the goal of creating high quality, entertaining content for devs — all dense with technical knowledge, strategic insight, and other valuable information to help you learn something new and grow your career.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapters:
0:00 This is MVP Week on The Full Stack
0:38 Checking in with the teams
0:58 Warm-Up Mini Game
5:04 Chaos Engineering Challenge
7:07 What is a good MVP?
13:32 Chaos Engineering presentations
21:04 Kelsey Hightower team feedback sessions
30:50 Main Challenge demos
39:32 Main Challenge judging and elimination
