The results are in! We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Google Cloud NEXT '26 Writing Challenge.
Your submissions covered a lot of ground: from building multi-step AI agents with Google ADK in a single day, to questioning what Google's 75% AI-generated code statistic actually means for developers, to exploring whether agents are the new microservices. We saw posts on GKE updates, cross-cloud data access, agentic compliance tooling, and even a beginner's honest account of navigating the Google Cloud maze for the first time.
The writing reflected a community grappling with what these announcements mean, not just summarizing the keynote, but asking what comes next. We loved reading every one of your submissions.
Now, let's get to our winners!
🎉 Congratulations To…
Prizes
Each winner will receive:
- $200 USD
- DEV++ Membership
- Exclusive DEV Badge
All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.
What's Next?
The Gemma 4 Challenge is live! Whether you love to build or love to write, there's a prompt for you and a $3,000 prize pool up for grabs!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. See you next time! 💜
Top comments (16)
Great work @ujja, @yinkaabeeb, @fm, @idncod, and @sreejit_caab72e273a4faa1f!!! Well done and Congrats :D
Thank you so much🥰. Really enjoyed this hackathon and looking forward to the next one 💪
Thanks a lot! 🙏
Thank you! It was a pleasure to write for such an amazing community of techies.
Congrats to the winners! Amazing work!
Congrats!!
Some great posts here
Congratulations to all the winners 👏
Thank you so much to the DEV team and @jess, and huge congratulations to the other winners.
I really enjoyed writing this piece because Google Cloud NEXT ’26 made it very clear that IAM is no longer just about users, because with agents entering production systems, IAM is becoming the trust map for humans andd delegated actions.
Really grateful that this perspective resonated with the community. Thank you for running the challenge. Delighted to have the unique badge on my Dev account!
Congrats to the winners!
This is exactly the kind of content the community needs! The examples are clear and the fixes are practical. I've personally struggled with the dependency array issue you mentioned in pattern #3 - it's easy to over-correct by adding too many dependencies. Your approach of rethinking the data flow is much cleaner. Would love to see a follow-up covering similar patterns with useRef and useContext. Excellent write-up!
Congrats
Congrats to all the winners! 🎉
I also submitted posts for this challenge, and while I didn't make the winner list, getting a nod from Richard Seroter on one of them was genuinely encouraging. That alone made the whole effort worth it.
The range of topics this challenge pulled out—from agentic architectures to billing‑page horror stories—shows how alive this community is right now. Thanks to the DEV team for running these. They stretch us in ways regular blogging doesn't.
And a special thank you to Richard Seroter and the entire judging panel for reading through what must have been a mountain of submissions. The time you put into this — reading, evaluating, and even dropping personal feedback — doesn't go unnoticed.
To the DEV team: these challenges are a rare thing. They push us to write with more depth and clarity than we'd normally muster, and that alone sharpens a lot of skills. Grateful to be part of a community that values that kind of growth.
On to the next one. 🚀
Thanks Google, @jess and the Dev Team!
Just woke up to this pleasant surprise! 🤩❤️