A 12-Week Alt-Route into Open Source
GitHub Education has long pushed on creating more on-ramps into the software industry than the traditional internship pipeline. The MLH Fellowship, powered by GitHub, is one such entry point: a 12-week immersive program where aspiring engineers skip the single-company internship model and instead contribute directly to open source projects that organizations and communities rely on.
Fellows are selected through a competitive application process and matched with maintainers and projects for the duration of the program. Over those 12 weeks, participants work on production-quality contributions, connect with a network of peers, maintainers, and mentors, and gain access to stipends, live technical training, and career support. Now in its third year, the program counts more than 700 alumni globally.
The current cohort reflects a wide range of backgrounds and approaches to problem-solving. Fellows bring their own experiences and skills to the projects they're matched with, and their work helps push forward the open source repositories they've been assigned to.
Alesana Eteuati
Eteuati, who has prior remote work experience, is eager to dig into StandUpMan, a project aimed at solving one of remote work's biggest pain points: coordinating daily standups. He says he's looking forward to deepening his open source experience by working under a maintainer and alongside fellow contributors on a new project.
Huilun Ang
Ang is excited to take on a new programming language while building something with real impact, and to learn best practices by contributing to solid open source projects.
Courtney Wilson
Wilson hopes her contributions on her assigned project will be useful to Hubbers, and is looking forward to collaborating with a distributed team and getting hands-on open source experience.
Ritesh Patil
Patil has been contributing to open source for a while and sees GitHub Docs as a major milestone, given how widely used the documentation site is. He's also interested in the technical writing side of the work, noting that communicating expertise clearly is a skill every developer benefits from, and hopes to eventually write a full article for GitHub Docs.
The Projects Being Worked On
The fellowship pairs participants' existing skills with hands-on engineering work on real projects, both inside and outside GitHub. Two open source repositories are part of this cohort.
GitHub Docs
GitHub hosts more than 73 million developers, and millions turn to GitHub Docs each month for guidance and troubleshooting. The documentation has been open source since October 2020, and in that time more than 1,000 pull requests from the community have been merged.
StandUpMan
StandUpMan is designed to cut down on meetings and communication clutter by letting team members post asynchronous updates through the channel they prefer. The goal is to improve transparency and help teams stay aligned and on schedule without forcing everyone into a live sync.
Rolling Applications for Summer
The MLH Fellowship runs year-round, with new batches starting every few months. Applications for the summer cohort are open now, and the schedule is built to accommodate major time zones. More details on the current Fellows' progress are expected as the program continues.
