At Major League Hacking, one of our goals is to “Learn. Build. Share.” and that’s why with your feedback and lots of hard work, we’re super excited to announce the official launch of MyMLH V2.
Since we launched MyMLH at Hackcon III in San Francisco last summer, we’ve learned a lot about how you have been using MyMLH to build better, more scalable hackathon registration systems.
Over the past year, more than 20,000 hackers have registered for more than 25 MLH Member Events using MyMLH including MHacks, HackTX, HackRU, HackNotts, BrickHack, RevolutionUC and many more. It has been fantastic watching hackers sign up in seconds for events and watching organizers focus their time on making the event experience better for hackers rather than worrying about recreating registration systems.
With MyMLH V2, there are a lot of new features that we’re excited to roll out:
Introducing Scopes
One of our most requested features for MyMLH was the ability to only share certain information. It’s something that made a lot of sense to us; similar to Facebook Login, developers & hackathon organizers can choose to ask for information that they need for their application. You can also choose to not authorize information that you don’t see fit to share with hackathons & third party applications.
And so the first important feature we’re adding is scopes. Scopes are a simple way for developers to only ask for information that they need, rather than having access to all of your account information by default. We’re excited to have this feature because it will provide a new level of transparency for users to make the MyMLH experience even better.
For example, if a hackathon wanted to know what school their users were from, they would need to ask for the school scope and users would be notified that the hackathon is requesting access to their school information.
Improving Quality of Data
Another popular suggestion was to improve data normalization. For those who don’t know, normalization is a way to reduce variation and redundancy in large user-submitted data sets. There might be five users, all of whom attend the same school, who each enter a different variant of their school name (different capitalization, official names vs shorthand, etc).
In MyMLH V2, we’ve worked very hard to provide a better user experience to help hackers select the official name of their school and we’ve deprecated Graduation Date in favour of Level of Study which more accurately represents the information that hackathons need to provide a great hacker experience.
The MLH Hackathon Boilerplate
At Hackcon EU last month in The Netherlands, we announced The MLH Hackathon Boilerplate. This is a powerful website boilerplate that removes a lot of the friction of setting up a website, such as the responsive design, SEO, hackathon FAQ, code of conduct and MyMLH registration integration.
MyMLH has always had very thorough documentation, but we wanted organizers to be able to roll out their registration systems without any technical expertise at all.
The MLH Hackathon Boilerplate is still in early stages but we’ve open sourced it on GitHub and would love to accept community contributions to help improve this resource for hackathons everywhere.
We’d love to hear your feedback
As always, we love hearing your thoughts on ways we can improve MyMLH. E-mail us at engineering@mlh.io with any feedback, questions, or ideas! And as announced at Hackcon IV, be sure to stay tuned for the alpha of custom fields & resume support over the next few months. Until then, be sure to take a look at our updated docs.
We can’t wait to see how these changes allow you to use MyMLH to better empower hackers.
Happy hacking!
Bilawal & The MLH Team