CyberHack 2026 was run by our Indonesia team with PT Indo Aneka Atsiri and Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, supported by AWS Indonesia.

A real problem, not a case study

The theme was how AI and technology could improve the manufacturing process at Sima Arome. Not a fictional brief written to be solvable, but an operation as it actually runs, with the constraints that come with it.

Participants had to engage with real operational challenges and work out where AI, software engineering and cloud could improve efficiency, tidy up workflows and support better decisions with data. That changed what the week was. It stopped being a competition and became a place to find out how software gets built for something that matters.

The shape of the week

Teams spent one to two days writing code. The rest of the programme went on discovery, iteration, feedback and refinement.

Most of the week went on understanding the problem. The build was the short part.

That ratio is how good product work actually looks, and it is usually the first thing a hackathon loses. The strongest solutions come from understanding the problem properly before rushing at it, and a week is only long enough for that if the week is not being spent elsewhere.

Why the foundation mattered

In most projects, teams lose their early days to setting up infrastructure, configuring systems and solving technical foundations before they can touch the business problem at all. In a six day programme that is fatal.

BuildPad, running on AWS, gave every team a foundation to start from. The days that would have gone on setup went on the problem instead, which is the entire reason the ratio above was possible.

How the work was judged

Each solution was assessed by a panel from industry, technology and academia. That meant projects were judged on business relevance, usability and practical value as well as on technical quality, which is a harder bar than a hackathon usually sets.

What teams handed in were secure, scalable, maintainable applications designed with enterprise standards in mind. Not experimental prototypes, and not things that would fall over the first time somebody outside the team used them.

Why it was worth running

One of the objectives was to help lift Indonesia's IT talent by putting students in front of real business challenges. Understanding user needs, business context and what the outcome is supposed to be is difficult to teach in a classroom, because a classroom problem has an answer key.

For students it was a bridge between what they had been taught and what industry expects. For the companies involved it showed what young talent produces when it is given the right tools and some mentorship. The event was covered locally by Radar Jatim and Jatim Pos.

The point

If students can reach production quality work in a week with the right foundation under them, the question worth asking is what is stopping your own teams. Usually it is not talent. It is the four days they never get back.