Hackathon for Adults & Professionals, Build Something Worth Building
Free hackathon for everyone. Pro-grade prep for those who want to build at production scale.
Syllabus updated August 2026
Flexible course duration
Duration depends on the student's background and pace. Beginners (kids / teens): typically 6 to 9 months. Adults with prior knowledge: often shorter, with an accelerated path.
For personalised duration planning, call +91 91233 66161 and we'll map a schedule to your goals.
Ready to Master Hackathon for Adults: Free Event + 12-Week Pro Prep (18+)?
Choose your plan and start your journey into the future of technology today.
Rated 4.9 across 547 Google reviews. Free demo first, no card needed. Monthly billing, cancel anytime.
International Students (Outside India)
Billed monthly in US dollars, the same price in every country. Contact us with any questions.
Program Overview
Hackathon for Adults & Professionals is a free-to-enter hackathon and a 12-week pro-grade prep course at Modern Age Coders, designed for working professionals, career switchers, founders, students 18+, and anyone who has ever said 'I wish I could just build that idea myself.'
The hackathon participation is 100% free, no fee, no employer endorsement needed. You can be a software engineer, a product manager, a designer, a marketer, a teacher, a doctor, a small-business owner, or a fresh graduate. If you're 18+ and want to build, you're in.
Our only motive: build something great. Build something innovative. Use coding logic, efficient algorithms, AI agents and modern infrastructure to ship real production software in 48 hours that solves a problem people would actually pay for.
The optional 12-week Pro Prep Course is for adults who want to walk into a hackathon (or a startup) with deep, current technical fluency. It is priced the same as our other professional courses, Group ₹1,499/mo, Mini Batch ₹2,999/mo, or 1-on-1 ₹4,999/mo.
The curriculum is dense and modern. We cover full-stack engineering with Next.js 16 + Server Actions + Cache Components, distributed system design, AI agents with tool calling and durable workflows, RAG pipelines with vector databases, prompt engineering with frontier models (Claude-class, GPT-class, Gemini-class), observability, security, and shipping to production on Vercel / AWS / Cloudflare. We also cover the soft skills that actually matter, scoping under time pressure, founder-grade pitching, sponsor relationship management, and demo storytelling.
By Week 12, every participant has a polished GitHub portfolio, a deployed capstone with paying-customer-ready quality, a 3-minute investor-style pitch video, and competes in the Live Modern Age Coders Pro Hackathon Weekend with sponsor prizes (cloud credits, API credits, mentor calls, and cash awards).
What Makes This Program Different
- Free hackathon participation, anyone 18+ can register at zero cost
- Prep course priced same as other Modern Age Coders professional programs
- Built for working adults: evening and weekend live sessions with structured catch-up support
- Curriculum led by senior engineers, ex-CTOs and YC-alumni founders
- Modern 2026 stack: Next.js 16, Server Actions, AI SDK, Workflow DevKit, Vercel Sandbox
- AI Agents focus, tool calling, multi-step workflows, durable execution
- RAG done properly, chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking
- System design depth: queues, caches, sharding, event-driven architectures
- Real production concerns: observability, security, on-call, cost
- 1-on-1 mentor matching with senior engineers / founders in capstone phase
- Founder-grade pitch lab with VC-style critique
- Sponsor prizes from cloud, AI and developer-tool partners
- Internship and full-time role referrals for top performers
- Career-switch friendly: pathway from non-tech career to first tech role
Your Learning Journey
Career Progression
Detailed Course Curriculum
Explore the complete week-by-week breakdown of what you'll learn in this comprehensive program.
Topics Covered
- What hackathons reward in 2026: shippable demos, AI-native UX, clear pitches
- MLH, SIH-grad, NASA Space Apps, AngelHack, internal corporate hacks
- Setting up a pro dev environment: VS Code, Cursor, GitHub CLI, Node 22, Python 3.12
- Python 3.12 essentials: types, dataclasses, async/await, packaging
- TypeScript 5 essentials: types, generics, narrowing, async patterns
- Reading and writing kind, clear code
- Engineering values: ship rough, refactor later; correctness over cleverness
- Git deep-dive: rebase vs merge, cherry-pick, bisect
- GitHub workflow at hackathons: feature branches, draft PRs, conflict resolution
- Hacker etiquette and 'kind code review'
Projects You Build
- CLI tool in Python and same tool in TypeScript
- Personal landing page deployed to Vercel
- First open-source PR to a public repo
Practice & Assignments
Configure your full pro environment with Cursor, GitHub CLI, Node 22 and Python 3.12, then write the same small utility in Python and TypeScript to compare ergonomics.
Topics Covered
- REST API design: resources, verbs, status codes, idempotency
- Postgres fundamentals: schemas, indexes, transactions
- Supabase fast track: DB + auth + storage + realtime in 30 minutes
- Connection pooling, migrations, seed data
- Authentication: Clerk vs Auth0 vs custom NextAuth, tradeoffs
- RBAC and row-level security
- Caching basics: HTTP, CDN, Redis
- Email + magic links + OAuth flows
- API testing with Hoppscotch
- Production-grade error handling
Projects You Build
- CRUD app with Supabase + Next.js
- Auth flow with Clerk + RBAC
- Public + private routes split with middleware
Practice & Assignments
Model a two table Postgres schema in Supabase with auth enabled and expose one authenticated REST endpoint with correct status codes.
Topics Covered
- Next.js 16 App Router fundamentals
- Server Components vs Client Components, when to use which
- Server Actions for form submissions and mutations
- Cache Components: PPR, use cache, cacheLife, cacheTag
- Streaming and Suspense
- Route handlers and middleware (proxy)
- Tailwind CSS productivity setup
- shadcn/ui, install, customize, theme
- Dark mode, responsive design, accessibility minimums
- Image and font optimization with Next.js
Projects You Build
- Marketing landing page with shadcn/ui
- Dashboard with charts (Recharts) + Cache Components
- Form-heavy app using Server Actions exclusively
Practice & Assignments
Build a Next.js 16 page that mixes Server and Client Components, handles a form through one Server Action and streams a slow section with Suspense.
Topics Covered
- 12-hour pro hackathon template: 1 hr ideate, 8 hr build, 1 hr deploy, 2 hr polish + pitch
- Picking a problem worth solving, adult-grade scoping
- Building solo with Cursor + Claude + Vercel preview
- Production checklist: env vars, error pages, monitoring, mobile
- Deployment with custom domain and SSL
- Recording a 2-minute demo with Loom
- Writing a judge-ready README + architecture diagram
- First pro pitch, 2 minutes with slides
- Self-grading using rubric
- Phase 1 retrospective
Projects You Build
- PHASE 1 CAPSTONE, Solo Pro Mini Hackathon: 12-hour build, deployed to a real domain, 2-minute pro demo, judge-ready README
Assessment
Phase 1 Pro Mini Hackathon Score Card with mentor feedback letter
Topics Covered
- Anthropic Claude-class frontier models, OpenAI GPT-class frontier models, Google Gemini-class frontier models, tradeoffs
- Vercel AI SDK fundamentals: generateText, streamText, tools
- Streaming responses to UI with React Suspense
- Prompt caching with Anthropic, 90% cost reduction
- Function/tool calling, turning LLMs into actuators
- Multimodal: text + image + file inputs
- Structured outputs with Zod schemas
- Cost tracking, rate limiting, fallback chains
- AI Gateway for provider failover
- Latency budgets and TTFB strategies
Projects You Build
- Streaming chat app with prompt caching enabled
- Multi-provider AI gateway with failover
- Structured-output extraction from PDFs
Practice & Assignments
Wire streamText from the Vercel AI SDK into a chat UI with one tool call, and measure token cost before and after enabling prompt caching.
Topics Covered
- What is an AI agent? Tools, memory, loop, termination
- Building agents with Vercel AI SDK + tool calling
- Multi-step planning and reflection
- Durable workflows with Vercel Workflow DevKit
- Pause/resume, retries, crash-safe orchestration
- Vercel Sandbox for safe code execution by AI
- Memory: short-term, long-term, semantic memory
- Evaluation: how do we know an agent is good?
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, extending agent capabilities
- Common failure modes: tool loops, prompt injection, runaway costs
Projects You Build
- Coding agent that writes, runs and tests code in Sandbox
- Research agent that browses, synthesizes and cites sources
- Customer support agent with persistent memory + escalation tool
Practice & Assignments
Build a two tool agent, for example web lookup plus calculator, with a visible step log and a hard termination condition.
Topics Covered
- When NOT to use RAG (fine-tuning vs RAG vs prompt eng)
- Embedding models: OpenAI text-embed-3, Cohere, Voyage
- Vector databases: pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant
- Chunking strategies: fixed, semantic, hierarchical
- Hybrid search: BM25 + dense embeddings + reranking
- Reranking with Cohere Rerank or Voyage Rerank
- Evaluation: groundedness, context precision, faithfulness
- RAG observability: trace every retrieval and answer
- Cost and latency tradeoffs
- When RAG fails, and how to debug
Projects You Build
- RAG over your own documents (PDFs + Notion export)
- Hybrid-search RAG with reranking
- Evaluation harness with at least 50 test queries
Practice & Assignments
Implement a small RAG pipeline over 20 to 50 documents with pgvector, then evaluate five queries and record where retrieval failed and why.
Topics Covered
- System design fundamentals: load, latency, consistency, partitioning
- When to add a queue (and which queue)
- Caching layers: client, CDN, app, database
- Database scaling: read replicas, sharding, connection pooling
- Event-driven architecture, webhooks, message queues
- Observability stack: logs, metrics, traces (OpenTelemetry)
- Security: OWASP top 10, CSP, secrets management
- On-call, error budgets, postmortems
- Pro Mock Hackathon: teams of 2-4, 24-hour build window
- Live judging panel with senior engineers + founders
Projects You Build
- PHASE 2 CAPSTONE, Pro Mock Hackathon: 24-hour team build with deployed product, agent or RAG component, full pitch + Q&A
Assessment
Pro Mock Hackathon Judges Panel scoring + written feedback letter
Topics Covered
- Idea finalists, picking a capstone with both judge-appeal and founder-potential
- Writing a 2-page Product Spec (problem, users, JTBD, MVP, stretch)
- Architecture diagram with picked tech stack and rationale
- Cost model: AI tokens, infra, third-party APIs
- Risk register and mitigation plan
- Mentor matching with senior engineers / founders
- Setting up CI, monitoring, error tracking from day one
- Drafting a 3-minute investor pitch outline
- GTM sketch: who, where, how (even for a hackathon, judges love this)
- Repo, project board, daily commit cadence rules
Projects You Build
- Product Spec (2 pages)
- Architecture Diagram with cost model
- First investor-style pitch outline
Practice & Assignments
Deliver your two page capstone spec with an architecture diagram, a token and infra cost model, and a risk register with mitigations.
Topics Covered
- Daily commits with great messages
- Pair programming with teammates
- AI-assisted coding with Cursor + Claude + Codex
- Mid-sprint mentor reviews and code walkthroughs
- Test critical paths (smoke + at least one E2E)
- Loading / empty / error states across the app
- Mobile and accessibility, judges open on phones
- Performance: Core Web Vitals, bundle size, edge runtime
- Observability: every error visible in Sentry / Vercel logs
- Daily standup logs to mentor
Projects You Build
- Capstone build, 70% complete by end of Week 10
- Daily standup logs (3 lines: shipped / shipping / blocked)
- Mid-sprint demo to mentor + 3 peers
Practice & Assignments
Ship daily for five days: clean commits, one mid sprint mentor review actioned, and one end to end test guarding your demo path.
Topics Covered
- Hackathon judging rubric (Innovation 25 / Execution 25 / Design 25 / Pitch 25)
- VC-style judging: 'why now, why you, why this big'
- The 3-minute pro pitch: Hook → Problem → Solution → Demo → Architecture → Traction (if any) → Team → Ask
- Slide design, minimal, image-first, 8 slides max
- Live VC-style critique sessions with senior mentors
- Recording a high-quality demo (multiple takes, edited in Loom or DaVinci)
- Voice and pacing tips from professional pitch coaches
- Q&A handling, 'I don't know' done well
- Final README polish, judges read this first
- Final code freeze, deployment health check, mobile/dark mode/edge cases
Projects You Build
- Pitch Slides (8 slides, Pitch.com / Tome / Canva)
- Pitch Video (3 minutes)
- Final README with hero image, demo URL, architecture, tech stack, team, GTM sketch
Practice & Assignments
Rehearse the three minute pitch on camera twice, tighten the deck to eight image first slides and prepare answers to the three hardest judge questions.
Topics Covered
- Friday: opening keynote, sponsor announcements, theme reveal, team check-in
- Saturday: 18-hour final sprint with senior mentor support
- Saturday evening: pitch dress rehearsal with VC-style critique
- Sunday morning: 4-hour final polish + production deploy
- Sunday afternoon: live judging, every team pitches in front of senior judges
- Sponsor categories: Best AI Agent, Best RAG, Best Founder Potential, Best Architecture, Best Pitch, Most Innovative, Audience Favorite
- Live judge Q&A with founders and CTOs
- Awards ceremony with cash prizes, cloud credits, mentor calls and founder intros
- Hall of Fame inclusion + sponsor follow-up calls
- Graduation: Pro Hackathon Builder Certification awarded
Projects You Build
- GRAND CAPSTONE, Live Pro Hackathon Submission: production-deployed product + GitHub repo + 3-minute investor pitch + 8-slide deck + judge-ready README + live presentation + Q&A
Assessment
Final Pro Hackathon Score + Founder Feedback Letter
Projects You'll Build
Build a professional portfolio with 12+ deployed projects + Live Pro Hackathon Capstone real-world projects.
Weekly Learning Structure
Certification & Recognition
Technologies & Skills You'll Master
Comprehensive coverage of the entire modern web development stack.
Support & Resources
Career Outcomes & Opportunities
Transform your career with industry-ready skills and job placement support.
Prerequisites
Who Is This Course For?
Career Paths After Completion
Salary & Market Context
The ranges below are general market salary bands for these roles in India and abroad, drawn from public industry data. They are shown for career context only and are not a promise or guarantee of income. Actual pay depends on your skills, experience, location, and the job market.
Course Guarantees
Real students. Real moments. Real joy.
These are our actual student meetups. No stock photos, no filters. Swipe through and meet the community you'll be joining.
What families say
Straight from the parents and students who learn with us. Rated 4.9 across 547 Google reviews.
“Mivaan enjoys the class. He understands the concepts and completes his tasks with excitement. He started taking interest in coding… truly amazing class.”
“I absolutely love it here! I made new friends and learned important valuable coding skills while having the fun of my life. It's not just coding here, it's outings, bonding and most importantly preparing you for your future. Definitely five stars.”
“What stands out most is how excited my son is before every class. He looks forward to learning, problem-solving, and sharing what he's built. I've noticed a big boost in his confidence!”
“Modern Age Coders has been a game-changer for me! I struggled to grasp IT concepts and coding before joining, but their classes transformed everything. I'm now the topper in my class and can confidently write complex programs with ease.”
“Modern Age Coder have wonderful teachers who teach in a clear, easy and practical way. The teacher boosts students' confidence, keeps them updated with technology, and inspires them to learn without hesitation.”
“The one step solution for my son. Modern Age Coders make learning coding so simple that kids love it.”
“Coding classes here make learning very interesting and conceptual. The teachers teach us in a very easy-to-understand and efficient manner.”
“One of the most wonderful education centres out there. Education is not limited to school syllabus but focuses on skill development. Learning here has been a wonderful journey and still continuing.”
“I highly recommend this computer coding class! The teachers are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about coding. They make every session engaging and insightful.”
“My child Dhairya is really enjoying the Modern Age Coder IT classes. This is his first online class, and he eagerly looks forward to it.”
“Very good classes. Don't worry about coding. They teach the best, especially Shivam sir.”
“Very good classes. Makes learning very easy and interactive.”
Hear it from our students
Real parents and students in their own words, on our public YouTube channel.
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