When Zebiao Hu found out he won the $10,000 Flutter Create grand prize, he didn't even tell his own wife. She learned about it through his posts on social media. He says he didn’t boast about his big win because he still sees himself as a beginner: He taught himself Flutter just weeks before the deadline, and created a compass app that won him the big prize.

Flutter is Google's toolkit for building beautiful apps that run on your mobile phone, laptop and web browser from the same code (instead of having to write a different app for each device, as is common today). When Google announced Flutter Create, the contest attracted attention from developers all over the world. We received nearly a thousand submissions from 60+ countries and regions, including entries from both first-time coders and Flutter experts. The contest challenged developers to build something interesting, inspiring, and beautiful with Flutter using five kilobytes or less of Dart code. That’s a tiny amount of space: to put it into perspective, that’s less than half a second of a typical digital music file.