Major League Hacking Fellowship — Full Experience

Courtney Wilson
4 min readMay 19, 2022

Amazing. If I could only use one word to sum up the Major League Hacking Fellowship experience, it would be amazing. This program allowed me, as a recent bootcamp graduate, to build on skills, try new things, work with some heavy hitters in the industry, and get real word hands on experience.

Overview

In the Fellowship, you are placed in a pod with anywhere from four to fifteen other podmates. Those numbers may not be exact, but it is what I gathered from my experience. There were five of us pod members and one pod leader for my group. We had daily standups where we met with our pod. Prior to these meetings, we filled out a standup form where we noted what our progress had been since the previous meeting, any blockers we may have been facing, and what our expectations were for tasks before the next stand up.

Two days a week, we had a cross pod event with another pod. We met with them for either a fun game day, an informative show and tell (more about that later), or a demo day. Demo days were quick overviews of our projects and what we had been working on so far.

Outside of our pod meetings, we met weekly with maintainers — people in charge of the project we were assigned to. These are usually managers from the company you are partnered with. Again, there are some heavy hitters in this Fellowship — Meta, Solana, AWS, and GitHub to name a few! We were either assigned small tasks specifically or would take them up on our own from an issues board. You will have access to communicate with your maintainer and can also discuss any questions with your project partner or pod leader.

Each of us in the pod had to come up with a show and tell subject. It could be something technical you had learned, a hobby you are passionate about, or an experience you’ve had. Everyone in our cross pod made powerpoint slides to go along with their show and tell. These usually took about 30–45 minutes and were absolutely fascinating! It was amazing to see the skillsets and knowledge everyone was bringing to the table.

Every week, there was a Cracking The Code Interview (CTCI) sessions, where one instructor would go over the a common and potential interview problem and teach the concept behind the question. These sessions were really valuable as they taught you how to approach interview questions.

Every CTCI and Fellowship event like guest speakers were recorded and made available for viewing later. It’s difficult to find a time that works for everyone when you are working with people from all over the world, so MLH made sure we had quick and easy access to these valuable recordings.

Week One

Week one was a whirlwind. I didn’t have any idea what was expected or what I would be doing. First, we met with our pod and came up with our pod name — Obsidian Octopusses. We were given some basic guidelines on what to expect for the week and we were randomly put into breakout rooms with one other podmate to give us the opportunity to meet each other. We then met with our project partner(s). This first week, we would participate in a Hackathon with our partner — Orientation Hackathon. We had the rest of the week to meet with each other and build a project from scratch. This sounds a bit intimidating, but it wasn’t at all, and was great getting to know my project partner.

During week one, we were also given the chance to meet with our project maintainers. I was very lucky to have been partnered with the wonderful team at GitHub Docs. This is who we would be reporting to and working with for the next 12-weeks. We established a weekly meeting schedule and got rolling with our first assignments — reading! We had to read over how to contribute, best practices, how to raise issues, etc. There was a lot of reading but it was so well worth it.

Remaining Weeks

As the weeks progressed we gradually built up to harder issues. These were mainly technical writing issues within the docs — things to refresh and update, typos or missing instructions, etc. We had the opportunity to work with some of the Docs engineers, as well, and work on a couple of those issues. I’ll never forget my first merge for an open source project. It just so happened to be that this open source project was GitHub Docs. Seeing my work up on the Docs website has been an amazing feeling.

We got closer as a pod during the program. Each week, we had the opportunity to see each other grow. Everyone was so supportive of each other and encouraging — it didn’t matter your skillset or prior experience. We all became great friends in the end. I will definitely be following along with their careers!

Career Week

About halfway through the program, we had a career week. MLH pod leaders and staff would review our resumes/LinkedIn and offer advice or give tips for crafting or maintaining them during/after the Fellowship. After all, this is amazing experience you are gaining! We were also given a mock interview token to brush up on those skills. There were plenty of special speakers who came in to discuss social media management, networking skills, resume building, and how to negotiate a job offer. Every speaker was top notch and really knew what they were talking about.

Wrapping Up

As the program came to a close, I felt like I had really accomplished something. This entire experience changed my life. I went from a fresh bootcamp graduate to someone who had actually worked on real life projects with an amazing company. I was lucky enough to work with GitHub. I met so many great people and I learned so much in a short amount of time and feel like a much more rounded software engineer because of it.

The program definitely opened my eyes to all the opportunities in the tech world and also helped me figure out what I was looking for in a career in tech. It’s an experience I will always remember and carry with me.

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