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Congrats to the Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge Winners!

Jess Lee on June 11, 2026

We are so excited to announce the winners of the Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge! We asked you to explore the announcements from Google I/O 2026...
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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ

Congrats @vrushali_dev_15, @tahosin, @toboreeee, @vicente_junior_dev, @rinisvs!!! Great work! :D

I am on time @jess lol

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Vrushali

Thank You So much

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Daniel Nwaneri

Congrats to all the winners! 🎉 @jess quick note while you're here: my OpenClaw Challenge prize invoice is now 14 days overdue in the Ramp system. I've completed everything on my end and have been following up for weeks. Could you help nudge the accounting team? Thank you

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fm profile image
Fayaz

Ah, I thought I was alone in this!

@jess: please let us know if there is any issue with the payment system!

DEV has been a lovely community for a very long time.
I'm sure most of us will be totally understanding of reasonable delays if we are kept in the loop.

All the best ❤️

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Jess Lee The DEV Team

@dannwaneri @fm - sorry for the delays here. We recently onboarded with a new accounting firm and are still trying to figure out our workflow with them. It is looking like our payments could take up to Net 45-60 once someone is officially set up in Ramp. We'll be updating the FAQs for this with future winners so expectations are set but you all got caught up in our process where it wasn't clear how quickly payments could be turned around. Thanks for your continued patience.

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dannwaneri profile image
Daniel Nwaneri

Thank you for the clarification, Jess.Really appreciate you responding. I'll hang tight. 🙏

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fm profile image
Fayaz

Ah! That's all I needed. A transparent follow up ❤️

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Rini Susan V S

Wow, excited and grateful about the win !! Thank you judges for hosting such a fun challenge, and congrats to all the other winners. Kudos to all writers !!!👍️

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S M Tahosin

Winning was exciting, but reading the other entries was just as valuable. What stood out to me is that the strongest posts didn't just recap announcements, they explored the implications behind them. That made this challenge feel less like a writing contest and more like a collective effort to understand where developer tools are heading next.

Congrats to all the winners and everyone who participated. Also, thanks to the DEV team and the judges for looking beyond popularity metrics and rewarding original thinking and practical analysis. It means a lot.

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fm profile image
Fayaz

Congrats to @vrushali_dev_15 + @vicente_junior_dev + @toboreeee + @rinisvs + @tahosin 🏆️🎉

All 5 new winners! Nice! 🥰

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Vrushali

Thank You!

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rishi

@jess Can you please clarify the winner selection criteria?

As mentioned earlier, the winner would be chosen based on the highest likes and engagement. However, the final results don't seem to align with those criteria. If likes and engagement were the deciding factors, it would be great to understand how the winners were actually selected.

This doesn't feel fair to many participants who put significant effort into increasing engagement. Looking forward to a transparent explanation.

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Stephen Sebastian

Engagement scores are tie breakers only

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rishi

If engagement scores were only tie-breakers, then please explain this result.

Just compare my posts with the winner's posts. Most of the winner's posts have around 6–10 likes, while my posts have significantly higher engagement, views, and likes — in some cases more than 20 times higher.

If engagement was considered at all, the outcome doesn't make sense. I'm not questioning the winners personally, but the selection process should be transparent and consistent with the criteria that were communicated to participants.

Right now, it genuinely feels unfair.

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Stephen Sebastian

This is the criteria bro, I had also participated but didn't win.

Judging Criteria:
Clarity & Quality: Is it well-written, engaging, and easy to follow?
Usefulness: Will the community learn something or be inspired by reading it?
Depth & Insight: Does it go beyond surface-level summary to offer a genuine perspective?

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rishi

I understand the criteria, and that's exactly why I'm asking for feedback.

I've reviewed my post multiple times, and as far as I can tell, it covers clarity, quality, usefulness, and depth. It was well-structured, detailed, easy to follow, and clearly resonated with readers based on the engagement and read time.

If you think my post was lacking in any of those areas, I'd genuinely like to know what specifically was missing. I'm open to learning and improving, but from my perspective, the post already met the stated criteria.

Could you point out what part of the criteria my submission failed to satisfy?

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Jess Lee The DEV Team • Edited

@zenrishi our judging criteria were as follows:

  • Clarity & Quality: Is it well-written, engaging, and easy to follow?
  • Usefulness: Will the community learn something or be inspired by reading it?
  • Depth & Insight: Does it go beyond surface-level summary to offer a genuine perspective?

This is consistent across all our challenge materials.

Edited to add:

Engagement is only used as a tie breaker. For example, if we are torn between two submissions and one has zero reactions and the other has a few, we would then select the one that has a few as the winner. But this is only after they have been shortlisted - we intentionally do not consider engagement as a judging criteria because we do not want these challenges to become popularity contests.

There are, in some rare circumstances, where we have a dedicated prize category for submissions with the most engagement but that prize category was not present for this challenge.

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Giorgi Kobaidze

Congrats everyone! Great job! 👏

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L. Cordero

Congratulations to all!

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neither galax

Congrats to all the winners

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Hemapriya Kanagala

Congratulations to all the winners 👏

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Stephen Sebastian

Congrats winners 😊😊

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Hrishika Malviya

congrats to all winner😇

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Om Shree

Congratulations 🎊 👏 💐 🥳.

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Joske Vermeulen

Well done by all of you! Congrats