AWS Student Community Day Mega Manila 2026: Build. Forge. Repeat.

We did not start with an event. We started with a community.

On September 11, 2026, 381 student builders, developers, and cloud enthusiasts gathered at Asia Pacific College in Makati for the AWS Student Community Day Mega Manila 2026. The whole day was driven by three simple words: BUILD. FORGE. REPEAT.

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Co-Facilitating Track A: Building Real-Time AI Experiences

During this flagship event, I co-facilitated Track A: Building Real-Time AI Experiences (the Agora Agents SDK Workshop) alongside Ashley Nicole Santos, Danilo Jr Casim, and Dearah Mae Barsolasco. My role was to facilitate attendees at their computers—not to co-lead the track or run things from the stage.

The cover photo is from that room: the “Real-Time Internet” slide up front, students at their PCs, and people moving between rows to help. That is what facilitation looked like for me.

The goal was simple: by the end of the session, every participant should have their own AI voice agent that you can actually talk to, live.

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Going Hands-On

I went fully hands-on with the participants. I wanted everyone to wire up the setup themselves, not just watch a demo.

In simple terms, here is what they built:

• A browser client, the page you open and talk into.
• The Agora RTC SDK, which carries your voice in real time.
• An agent layer that does three jobs:
  • Speech-to-text (STT): turns your voice into text.
  • An LLM: reads that text and decides what to reply.
  • Text-to-speech (TTS): turns the reply back into a voice.

Watching students run into their own errors, fix them, and then hear their AI voice agents respond live was the highlight of my day.

It reminded me of something I really believe: you do not have to wait until you are in the industry to start building real solutions.

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Speaker badge, facilitator role

Later in the day I received a Certificate of Recognition that thanks Kurt Axcel as a Speaker for AWS Student Community Day Mega Manila 2026, given September 11, 2026 at Asia Pacific College, Makati, by an AWS Student Builder Group. The flat-lay photo in the gallery shows that certificate text, my SPEAKER badge, the green lanyard, and the event tote—word for word, as printed.

That wording is real, and I am grateful for it.

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SYNC: Built by Students, for the Event

Beyond the workshops, the event itself was a great example of student engineering.

Moving hundreds of people across tracks running at the same time is a real problem. So the community built SYNC, a digital event companion that handled:

• A live schedule
• My Flow, a personal agenda for each attendee
• One-tap networking through LinkedIn and QR codes
• Announcements throughout the day

It proved that real constraints make better builders.

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Thank You

A big thank you to the AWS Student User Group Philippines and the AWS Student Builder Group – Rizal Technological University for organizing, to our venue partners Asia Pacific College and the AWS Student Builder Group – Asia Pacific College, and to our sponsors Tutorial Dojo and eCloudvalley.

Thank you as well to our partners Data Engineering Pilipinas, for the DataCamp scholarships, and Eskwelabs, for the internship opportunities. You all made an event of this size possible.

I also want to shout out Catherine Notado for documenting this milestone on the AWS Builder Center. Her full article is one of the references I used to make my documentation accurate as possible.

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A Starting Point, Not Just a Date

When you give people the right space, community, and tools, an event stops being just a day on the calendar. It becomes a starting point.

Let's keep building.

Keep building, keep learning. See you on the cloud.