From learning to shipping: the MLH Fellowship’s summer 2022 class

Major League Hacking’s MLH Fellowship is built on a simple premise: learn by doing, not by watching. For 12 weeks, aspiring software engineers on the open source track contribute to projects that many companies and communities depend on. With the spring 2022 cohort wrapped up, GitHub is announcing the fellows joining the summer 2022 cycle.

Spring 2022 in review

Feedback from the spring cohort paints a clear picture of the program’s impact on both fellows and maintainers.

GitHub Docs

Maintainers praised fellows Courtney Wilson and Ritesh for their work on the GitHub Docs site. Courtney, who wrote about her full experience, highlighted how the hands-on work improved her skills and confidence:

“What an amazing opportunity to get real, hands-on experience with awesome companies…Working with the GitHub Docs team has been an amazing experience. Collaborating with a wonderful team, I worked daily to help maintain and improve the GitHub Docs site and learned how open source projects work.”

StandUpMan

“It was an honor for StandUpMan to offer a mentoring umbrella in the MLH summer cohort of 2022,” said the project’s maintainer. “My two candidates, Huilun and Alesana, advanced the project greatly.”

Meet the summer 2022 fellows

The new fellows bring varied personal and professional backgrounds to their matched open source projects. Their work this cycle will focus on two projects, each with distinct technical stacks and goals.

Program Equity

Built on Vue.js, Program Equity is a community-driven project designed for creating single-page applications. Fellows will collaborate with Tech for Social Good MERL research groups and the internal team. The project follows the DevSecOps framework, giving fellows exposure to code patterns similar to enterprise architectures. Work spans traditional roles like full stack and UX/UI, with opportunities to explore GitHub features around automation, containerization, and database abstraction.

M&E Insight

M&E Insight is an open source monitoring and evaluation data management system created by the Education Development Center (EDC) for international development projects. It is designed to scale and adapt quickly to any project. The system has been deployed across 13 large-scale USAID-funded projects in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Built on the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), M&E Insight provides a shared data vocabulary and a reusable set of data elements across projects.

The fellows

Param Siddharth is joining the Program Equity development team, driven by a goal to build software that supports communities: “I’ve always sought developing software to support the common beings and fight social issues affecting communities, and working on Program Equity feels like just the right opportunity.”

Mariah Morales, a career switcher with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, is eager to collaborate across borders: “This project will only aid in really getting me where I want to go. I am excited to be working on a team and collaborating with people from all over the world for the first time.”

Ishika Kesarwani will contribute to the Education Development Center’s project: “I have always found learning new things exciting and rewarding…I’m looking forward to learning a lot!”

What comes next

The MLH Fellowship runs year-round with new batches starting every few months. For details on applying and working on open source projects, see the MLH Fellowship site.