A virtual on-ramp to open source

When COVID-19 erased the summer internship pipelines most students rely on, Major League Hacking (MLH) created an alternative with backing from a coalition that includes Facebook, Royal Bank of Canada, DEV, Amazon Web Services, Twilio, and GitHub. The MLH Fellowship pairs student developers with real open source projects and full-time engineering mentors over a twelve-week program.

That substitute for traditional industry experience drew a massive response: nearly 20,000 students applied in May. This summer, 144 Fellows from 23 regions and 15 timezones were selected to make public contributions to projects like Homebrew, HTTPie, Babel, Keras, AWS Amplify, and React.

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The shape of the incoming class

Fellows skew heavily toward JavaScript and Python as primary languages, with C/C++ as a notable secondary skill:

  • JavaScript: 47% listed it as their primary language, with 22% naming it secondary
  • Python: 34% primary, 26% secondary
  • C/C++: 5% primary, 16% secondary

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The cohort isn't short on ambition. Honson Tran, a Rutgers student, applies machine learning work at Cornell Weill toward a real-time 3D model of a patient's heart. Katherine Bancroft previously built an app helping aphasia patients relearn speech. Baffour Adu Boampong, a Facebook Developer Circles member, built a tool to track COVID updates from Ghana's Health Service.

For Tran, the Fellowship offers something internship interviews never did—a chance to talk about meaningful work:

I probably sat through 6-7 hours of internship interviews, digging into leetcode. But you never get a chance to talk about why what you do matters. I am finally getting to have some impact in the tech space, and having that impact can potentially save thousands of lives.

Early traction in the pods

Fellows work in small teams called pods, each with a dedicated engineering mentor. Just weeks into the program, those teams are already shipping. Bancroft, from Pod 0.5.1, is working on cookie storage issues in HTTPie:

Jakub, the HTTPie maintainer, gives amazingly thorough code reviews so I've definitely been learning a lot about how to make my code more Pythonic from his suggestions!

Baffour's pod, 0.0.1, is automating formula updates for the Homebrew project and has released a working version of its API parser. Across the cohort, projects span machine learning, visualization tooling, and the libraries that underpin daily development.

Why sponsors are backing students

Corporate support for the Fellowship reflects a broader bet on open source as both an innovation engine and a talent pipeline. Ryan Yang, Vice President of DevOps at the Royal Bank of Canada:

Open source is one of the best ways to innovate, and RBC is focused on both participating in and contributing to that culture. By supporting students in this area, we are not only giving back to the community at a much needed time, but also continuing to drive the open source community forward.

Facebook's Head of Open Source, Kathy Kam, frames the program as a diversity play as well:

For Facebook, investing in open source is a way to empower developers as well as broader communities of individuals and businesses. To that end, we're thrilled to support MLH's global Fellowship program which will not only help us invest in the next generation of open source developers but also promote increasing diversity in tech.

After their twelve weeks of public contributions, these Fellows will have learned not just modern workflows but the collaboration habits required to maintain software the world runs on.