Hey Hackers! My name is Victor Zeddys and I am a Junior Back-end Developer. I have been pursuing a career in tech since 2017! I participated in two semesters of the Open Source Track of the Major League Hacking (MLH) Fellowship.
When I found out about the MLH Fellowship on Twitter, it seemed like a natural fit! I had wanted to learn how to contribute to open-source projects for a while and didn’t know where to get started.
My dream is to be among the best-distributed systems engineers in the world and the MLH Fellowship has bolstered my career and given me the valuable skills needed to get there.
A Collaborative & Fast-Paced Environment For Learning
The relaxed and collaborative environment of the MLH Fellowship is great for facilitating rapid growth. There was always an active feedback loop, allowing me to learn, grow, and execute my tasks more efficiently.
I was able to learn a lot from the people I met in the MLH Fellowship. My pod was very diverse with MLH Fellows from different continents and time zones. I met and made friends with many interesting people from across the globe. I appreciated the opportunity to collaborate with a global community of developers through the MLH Fellowship.
Real-world Experience with Support from Industry Leaders
In my first semester of the MLH Fellowship, I helped create Amazon S3 buckets and assisted with performance testing. I gained valuable knowledge about the Robot Framework for acceptance test-driven development and honed my technical skills in Java. Through the MLH Fellowship, I also got to work together with the team at G-Research contributing to a distributed big data storage platform, Apache Ozone.
In my second semester, I worked on infrastructure as code (IaC) project with guidance from the G-Research OSS team. I learned several new skills and became familiar with a variety of languages and platforms including Go, Pulumi, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). My biggest takeaways from the semester were that I contributed to Apache ozone where I worked on a patch for bucket creation performance test for freon: HDDS-5779.
Leveraging the MLH Fellowship to Kickstart a Career
The MLH Fellowship was crucial in helping me kickstart my career after graduating college. The program gave me a rich professional portfolio that made me stand out amongst other candidates.
I have since earned a job as a Back-end Engineer at Tanda Africa, a Nairobi-based fintech firm because of the experience I gained in the MLH Fellowship. If you’re considering applying for the MLH Fellowship, I would say just do it! There’s nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain.
Interested in the MLH Fellowship?
Connect with Victor on LinkedIn, and visit our website here for more information about the MLH Fellowship and to apply for the program.