Congrats to the "Built with Google Gemini: Writing Challenge" Winners!

By Jess Lee on Mar 19, 2026. Originally published on DEV.to.
Congrats to the "Built with Google Gemini: Writing Challenge" Winners!

The results are in! We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Built with Google Gemini: Writing Challenge presented by Major League Hacking (MLH).

Choosing our five winners was no easy task. The submissions we received were candid, thoughtful, and packed with genuine insight. From passion-projects to side-hustles, wild-ideas and thoughtful-tools, we were struck by how openly participants shared both the highlights and the friction points of working with Google Gemini. That kind of honesty is what makes a great reflection post, and you all community delivered.

To everyone who submitted: thank you for taking the time to write it all down. We hope putting it into words was as valuable as the building itself.

Without further delay, here are the winners.

Congratulations To…

@jowi00000 built Plante, an automated greenhouse monitor that leverages the Google Gemini API to power two core features: Context-Aware AI Chat and Weekly Pulse Insights. We loved learning about the hardware components and how the team gamified the frontend experience for users.


@francistrdev provided a deep, honest analysis of using Google Gemini for contributing to Forem (the OSS that powers DEV 😄) and vibe coding a project for our Weekend Challenge.


@astrodeeptej fused NASA data with Gemini to build "CosmoDex", an interactive dashboard for tracking Near Earth Objects. Google Gemini was utilized to generate dynamic, gamified threat assessments and sci-fi lore, a stellar example of making data engaging and accessible!


@phalkmin shares their experience of using Gemini CLI as a junior dev. We learn about how they refined their prompting strategy saved two legacy codebases.


@mirshah12 built "ProcSee", an autonomous security investigation system that monitors every process on your machine in real-time. When something looks suspicious, it hands the investigation off to Gemini 3 Pro to write a full forensic report.

Prizes

Our five winners will receive:

All Participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.

What’s next?

Join the Notion MCP Challenge happening now through March, 29!


As always, keep an eye on our challenge page to see what’s launching next, and follow the challenge tag so you don’t miss any announcements:

#devchallenge

This is the official tag for submissions and announcements related to DEV Challenges.

If you want to keep building with Google AI, check out our DEV Education Tracks:

Thank you to everyone who participated! We hope you reflecting on and sharing your projects in this type of challenge motivates you to keep building things that you feel passionate about.