A hackathon for people who have never been to one.

Walk into most college hackathons as a first-semester student and you are competing against final-year students who have shipped three internships and have a GitHub full of projects. You lose, you conclude you are not technical, and you never sign up again. That is a bad outcome caused by bad event design, not by a lack of ability.

FirstHack 2026 is built to remove that specific failure. First-years are judged in their own track. Mentors are online for the full build window so that being stuck for six hours on a setup error is not what decides your result. Nobody is expected to arrive knowing how to build a product — the event itself is where that is meant to happen.

The goal is not to find India's best young engineer. It is to get a few thousand students to finish and submit one real thing, early enough in college that it changes how they see themselves.

We think it is worth being direct about this, because a lot of student events are vague on purpose.

• We are not a placement or job guarantee. You get a project, a certificate, and experience — not an offer letter.
• We are not a course or a bootcamp. There is no syllabus. You build, mentors unblock you, judges evaluate the result.
• We are not free, and that is deliberate. Free events have 70–80% no-show rates, which means half-empty teams and mentors sitting idle. The fee filters for people who actually turn up.

FirstHack 2026 runs for the first time on 22 October 2026. We are saying that plainly rather than implying a history we do not have. What that means for you, honestly:

• You will not find alumni testimonials on this site, because there are none yet.
• Everything published here — the schedule, the judging rubric, the prize split, the refund policy — is written down in advance specifically so it can be held against us.
• If we get something wrong, the fastest way to reach a human is support@firsthack.in.