DevRel Awards MLH Fellowship “Best Developer Education Initiative”
Who We Are
For those of you who don’t know Major League Hacking (MLH) yet, we’re the organization that’s empowering our next generation of technologists (or hackers as we call them!) to launch their careers. There’s a massive gap between knowing how to code and being employable in tech. We create immersive educational experiences like hackathons and fellowships where developers can actually gain hands-on experience with the technologies they’ll end up using every day.
It may seem incredible, but more than a third of all US software developers joining the job market this year are alumni of the MLH community. Many of you reading this right now may have your own fond memories of MLH from when you were in university, attending MLH hackathons every weekend. These events, and the resulting network, have enabled hundreds of thousands around the world to do incredible things with technology. We’ve doubled down on empowering hackers to learn skills and make positive impacts. With programs like Global Hack Week and the MLH Fellowship, programmers have more ways to learn than ever before.
The DevRel Awards
Developer relations, or DevRel, is the work of organizations to form meaningful relationships with software developers.
In a string of years where the promise of the future has seemed uncertain, we’re extremely proud of and optimistic about a new way to offer significant support to highly deserving rising technologists. The MLH Fellowship pairs experienced mentors with a diverse population of early-career developers. Fellows work on open source projects as a way to learn real-world engineering skills that create incredible career opportunities for themselves. Many of these projects are sponsored by companies deeply invested in building open source ecosystems like Meta, Solana Labs, AWS, and G-Research.
The DevRel Awards recognizing the MLH Fellowship as the “Best Developer Education Initiative” matters. It’s a very early leading indicator that the MLH community is making something far more accessible than ever before: an improved means of learning software engineering and getting hired in the field, regardless of your formal education.
A Reminder of the Mission of the MLH Fellowship
The MLH Fellowship formed in the wake of a staggering loss:
~40,000 members of the MLH community, entrants to software engineering, lost jobs or internships due to COVID-19 in 2020.
As the organization that operates at the intersection of software engineering and student communities, we had to respond to this crisis. We had tens of thousands of students who were suddenly out of options (and in a lot of cases, out of a means of supporting themselves), and we had thousands of tech companies who desperately needed talent. We knew we could bring them together to create something special — something that would help both groups. And, so the MLH Fellowship was developed to ensure that these talented emerging programmers didn’t lose out on the beginning of their careers or entire internship seasons.
There’s a lot to recommend the MLH Fellowship, but I’m going to highlight just two dimensions of it that are especially relevant for those paying attention to developer hiring trends:
- Admitted hackers receive a stipend so that they can earn-and-learn.
- It’s remote, which opens access to a world-class internship experience globally.
These factors are democratizing access to industry on-ramps that have historically been closed to those who should be more represented in our industry, those who are deserving no matter their economic background or their physical location.
Many exciting stories and developments are ahead for these Fellows and the MLH Fellowship. Will you help train and hire the developers of tomorrow? Find out how to sponsor MLH Fellows.
Originally published at https://news.mlh.io on April 8, 2022.
