MLH Fellowship Experience

I’ve been meaning to take some time and write about my experience thus far working in the Major League Hacking Fellowship program so will be playing catch up now in this post and make it a point to write more frequently about it. In today’s article, I will be talking about -

• My experience interviewing
• Week One Orientation Hackathon
• Teaming up with GitHub Docs
• My day to day experience in the Fellowship

For any who may not know, the Major League Hacking Fellowship is a program designed by Major League Hacking to help aspiring technologist build their skills and gain real-world experience by collaborating on real-world projects. It’s a 12 week remote internship alternative that is offered to people from all over the world! There are three different tracks you can apply for. I applied for the Software Engineering — Open Source track. It’s a fantastic community to be a part of.

Interviewing

The interviewing experience with MHL was great. I wouldn’t say it was easy, and I wouldn’t say it was hard. There are two 15-minute interviews. The first interview was a basic “get to know you” interview to understand better who you are and why you want to be a part of the Fellowship. I was asked a few questions about my journey into the world of software engineering and had a great conversation with my interviewer. The atmosphere was comfortable and I felt able to speak freely about what brought me here and my eagerness to continue learning.

The second interview, I was asked a few questions about my stack and to go over one of my projects. I explained it as I went and was asked a few questions here and there about the reasoning behind some of my coding decisions or basic questions over JavaScript. Again, I felt very comfortable throughout the process. Shortly after, I was accepted into the program!

Week One Orientation Hackathon

Week one was whirlwind for me. I was the only bootcamp grad in my pod, the other four are computer science majors! I felt out of my depth but everyone was so welcoming and excited to get started with our projects. We are from all over the globe, so it’s been a blast getting to know everyone. We took care of some pod business on day one such as naming our pod and going over some orientation documents, but then we were released to breakout rooms with our partner(s) to discuss our Orientation Hackathon.

I had no previous experience with hackathons, so I had no idea what to do. My partner had a little experience, so we were able to come up with a bit of a plan. We did have some questions, as the Orientation Hackathon encouraged us to use the technology assigned to us in our Fellowship projects and come up with an application for them. My partner and I were assigned to GitHub Docs. Docs aren’t really a tool to build with but documentation to refer to. So it was a bit of a challenge to figure out what to do next but we decided on creating a template for documentation that could easily be used by anyone. We got through the the Hackathon week, it was a bit of a blur, but all went well and I learned a lot from week one alone.

Teaming Up with GitHub Docs

During our first week, we also met with the leads on the projects we would be working on for the next 12-weeks. This. Was. Awesome! We met up with one of the maintainers of the GitHub Docs repo and have had standing meetings with her and others since. This particular partnership deals a little less with coding but more with technical writing and learning how to contribute to an Open Source project, which the docs are considered. It has been such a wonderful experience. I enjoy writing anyway so the technical writing bid has been a fresh challenge for me. I learned so much during the second week. We are starting out working on and fixing simple issues reported throughout the docs but it will increasingly get more involved as we keep moving into the weeks ahead. I had my first work merged with the main branch in week 3 and it felt amazing and motivated me to push forward even more! With me being so new to the technical world, this was my first time ever contributing to an Open Source project, and I admit, it’s a bit addictive.

Day to Day in the Fellowship

The day to day life in the Fellowship has been excellent. We are working on our own and meeting up with our project partners frequently, as well. We meet daily with our pod and do our daily stand ups — we fill out a form on Discord every day talking about what we’ve done since the last standup, what we plan to do, any issues we are having, etc,. and go over this with our whole pod. We have a weekly retrospect in our pod as well, where we discuss the things that went well for us the the previous week and what we feel we could do better with. It’s not all serious talk, we have some game days, too, as a way to get to know each other better and have fun.

The Fellowship also provides a sort of career training week later on in the Fellowship where we can get help with resumes and schedule mock interviews. We aren’t quite there yet, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say on it when I’ve experienced it.

We are encouraged to meet frequently with our pod leader(s). My pod actually has two and they are amazing. They are always willing to jump in and help out where we need them on these projects or are ready to step in if we have any concerns. They do a great job of encouraging and motivating everyone, too.

My pod is amazing. Everyone is friendly and helpful. Everyone loves being a part of this and everyone genuinely wants to learn and better themselves as software engineers. The community alone has been worth it, but the experience is invaluable. I’m very happy to be a part of this Fellowship!