The rate at which the global student hacker community is growing is nothing short of phenomenal. We organize student hackathons in the UK and have seen our events inspire determined and passionate students into making more friends, becoming better developers and making an impact for themselves, the people around them and the world at large.

With this success, we’ve been looking for ways to make it even better. That is why we’re extremely excited to announce MLH UK with our first ever season starting this winter. We think it will help us encourage new hackathons, bolster the existing ones and ultimately provide the best platform for the student hacker community in the UK.

MLH UK will be a competition for all British universities. When a student attends a hackathon, they earn their university a point on our leaderboard. When a university hosts a hackathon, that university earns a point for each student who attends. At the end of a season, the university with the most points is declared the winner and they’ll also receive a totally badass trophy.

Badass trophy aside, we’re more than a competition. We’ll provide support to students who organise hackathons or who want to set up hacking societies. We will help hackathons get sponsorship, organise buses to hackathons, and make sure events don’t clash. Anything to do with hacking, we’re here to help.

The first ever MLH UK season starts in October and it kicks off with an official MLH UK launch hackathon in the heart of London. The UK’s biggest collegiate hackathons will also be joining us:

  • MLH Launch Hack (Oct 4/5, London)
  • StudentHack III (Oct 31-Nov 2, Manchester)
  • HackNottingham (Nov 8/9, Nottingham)

We’ll be announcing many more hackathons at a later date. If you’re a student hackathon organizer in the UK and we haven’t yet been in touch, please drop us a line and let’s get the ball rolling.

The Team

MLH UK will be organized by the following team:

Tim Fogarty

Tim Fogarty UK Commissioner

Tim studies Physics and Maths at the University of Nottingham and is president of the university’s hacking society, HackSoc (@hacksocnotts).

Joe Nash

Joe Nash HackSoc Nottingham

Joe studies Computer Science at the University of Nottingham and is founder and former president of HackSoc (@hacksocnotts). He is also a Twilio Hero and PayPal BattleHack 2013 Finalist as part of Team London.

Bilawal Hameed

Bilawal Hameed StudentHack

Bilawal is currently studying Computer Science at Manchester Metropolitan University and founded one of the largest student hackathons in the UK, StudentHack (@studenthack), in 2012.

Syeef Karim

Syeef Karim StudentHack

Syeef is studying Computer Science at Manchester Metropolitan University. He also helps organize StudentHack (@studenthack).

We’re really excited to bring MLH to the UK. We believe hackathons can benefit students all over the world and we can’t wait to get involved with MLH towards building and blossoming a global hacker community we can all be proud of.

– Bil, Joe, Tim and Syeef (MLH UK)