Earlier today, we announced the launch of the next version of the MLH Fellowship, which you can read about here. We are now very excited to share our first returning sponsor for the 2020-2021 academic year and next summer: Facebook! Through the MLH Fellowship, students are able to build important technical skills under the guidance of experienced engineering mentors working alongside open source maintainers.
Over the past few months, our inaugural batch of MLH Fellows have gotten their start in open source and made major pull requests to React, React Native, Jest, Docusaurus, and Relay. We are so proud that the code written by MLH Fellows is now part of millions of projects around the world that are powered by these foundational open source repos.
Learn about some of their contributions below:
- They created a new profiler tool that allows developers to find performance prioritization issues in React Concurrent Mode applications.
- They built a tool allowing React Native developers using Facebook’s Hermes JS runtime to debug app performance issues using Chrome Dev Tools
- They redesigned and rebuilt RNTester, React Native’s built-in test bench application which is used when developing and e2e testing React Native’s UI components.
- They implemented a mechanism to generate the React Native API documentation using React Native codebase’s types and code comments as a source of truth, helping project maintainers keep documentation always accurate and up to date.
This is only a small sampling of the amazing work MLH Fellows have done this past summer.
Kathy Kam, Head of Open Source at Facebook, sees their involvement in the Fellowship as an investment in the future of technology:
Over the summer, during Facebook’s sponsorship of the inaugural Fellowship program we were thrilled and gratified to see MLH uplevel the skillsets of a diverse group of 150 fellows from 20+ countries while making impactful contributions to key projects. In the MLH Fellowship Program, we see a unique opportunity to more evenly spread the benefits of open source to broader communities around the world. This is why we’re doubling down on our investment in the MLH Fellowship for a year-long program which we hope will continue to promote increasing diversity in tech and empower the next generation of open source developers.
We are so thankful for Facebook’s support, and can’t wait to help the next batch of MLH Fellows learn key open source skills and contribute to the wider developer ecosystem.
If you’re interested in joining our full time or part time Open Source Fellowship program this Fall, you can apply now at https://fellowship.mlh.io/
Happy hacking!