This October, Major League Hacking (MLH) is delving deeper into the Open Source community by sponsoring All Things Open 2021, a three-day conference focusing on the resources and people that are revolutionizing Open Source.
During All Things Open, you’ll be able to find the MLH team at our booth in the conference expo and after our panel, Where Do Great Open Source Contributors, Maintainers, & Hires Come From. Stop by to learn about MLH, the MLH Fellowship, and our global developer community. This is a great opportunity to explore what working with MLH would look like for your company. We’ll also be running a raffle for anyone who drops by where you could win a microphone, Zoom camera, ring light, and more.
Additionally, MLH will be hosting the first-ever annual MLH Open Source Awards to recognize leaders who are making a positive impact on the Open Source community. There are three categories for which nominations are being accepted:
- Inclusion & Diversity Award – The company / project / program doing the most to promote building a diverse, welcoming community.
- Next Generation Award – The company / project / program doing the most to attract, educate, and retain the next generation of open source citizens.
- Community Award – The company / project / program doing the most to build the broader Open Source community.
Nominations will close on Thursday, September 30th, and will be chosen by a panel of industry experts based on the quality of the applications. They will be announced at the conference on Monday, October 18th. Submit your nominations now!
Open Source is incredibly important to developers, but many struggle to get started contributing. 93% of hackers reported that they believe contributing to Open Source will be important in their career but only 41% of respondents have actually managed to contribute to Open Source. Most developers feel like they either aren’t skilled enough yet or just don’t know where to get started
When the pandemic hit and more than 40,000 community members lost their summer opportunities, we saw the perfect moment to help our community get started with Open Source and to familiarize them with remote work. This was when we launched the MLH Fellowship, a 12-week remote internship alternative for aspiring technologists. Instead of interning at a single company, they learn to contribute to real-world Open Source projects from our partners such as GitHub, Facebook, AWS, and Adobe.
Over the last 12 months, nearly 600 Fellows have graduated from the MLH Fellowship. These Fellows submitted almost 10,000 Pull Requests into popular Open Source projects like React, Flask, and AWS Amplify with a 75% merge rate. Many of them have since landed internships and jobs with our partners too! After seeing all this success, we knew we needed to get the word out about the program, and so we decided to partner with All Things Open to find other companies that want to empower the next generation of Open Source contributors!
We could not be more excited to be supporting All Things Open 2021 and the incredible Open Source community. If you are at the conference, please drop by our booth to say hello!