The Pursuit of Happyness: MLH Fellowship Edition
After recently graduating from the Fellowship and finally coming out of the feels river, let me try and share my MLH fellowship experience: The Pursuit of Happyness style.
Let me take you back to early May. When I got the news of my internship being rescinded and summer plans facing turmoil, I didn’t know what to do.
At this point, I was blindly applying to every internship opportunity I stumbled upon, was reaching out to people, digging the hidden corners of LinkedIn but mostly questioning the purpose of my existence. 😢
This was the time when my seniors at GitHub(Erica, Maneesh and Juan) and MLH(Yashovardhan) pointed me to a program named MLH Fellowship (Thank you OGs! ✨). I got to know about this awesome fellowship where a person would be spending their Summer to work on Open Source projects. But not just yet another open-source project, but *really big* open-source projects. Sounds cool, right?
As big of an Open Source Enthusiast I am, I applied.
This part of my Summer is called: Hope.
Moving forward a few days, I had my interviews and was selected. Yayy!!
This was hands down one of the smoothest and the SWIFTest(pun intended xD) interview experience I ever had.
Not knowing what to expect, I went to the fellowship like a child going to Disneyland for the first time. Curious to explore new things and hoping to have a blast! And boy, I wasn’t disappointed.
To kick off the first week, we were all assigned to a group of students with whom we’ll be working throughout the Summer called “Pods”. This week was filled with ultra-cool activities to make us feel comfortable and ease us in the fellowship.
All of us were asked to give our Pods a personalised name, have 1 on 1 calls with each other, most exciting of them all, we kicked the Major League Hacking Fellowship the right way. How? You may ask: The fellowship started with a Hackathooooooonnnnnn!!!
We created a project to reduce the trauma faced by almost every Front End developer. We created a project to simplify CSS!! We call is CSSify.
Guess what, we were the Finalists too! Check out the project here.
This part of my Summer is called: being a neophile.
Now finally all the Pod members started to bond together, and we gave our Pod the coolest name ever. Period.
From that moment, we were called Syntactic Seahorses.
We used to have daily standups, weekly retros and show and tells.
These show and tells will hold a special place in my heart. ❤
Now, let me try and introduce you to every Syntactic Seahorse.
Ayush Jain: Need help with an algorithmic problem, he is the de facto!
Nilarjun Das: PR pending for a long time, and your team is busy? Hit him up for a quick and concrete PR review!
Aniketh Saha: Remember the cool Gilfoyle from Silicon Valley, Aniketh was the Gilfoyle of the gang.
Saurabh Agrawala: Need some tips on how to win a hackathon, he is the guy for you.
Aniket Kumar: Have *literally* any React related problem, he can fix it for you.
Ansh Ghoda: He had a special bond with XCode and Turbo Modules. (if you know, you know :p)
Siddharth Sham: CSS god! Also, a figment of our imagination.
Harshil Agrawal: Need some positive vibes, talk to him!
Karan Sanjeev: If you are in the same room as him, he is the xXAlphaXx xD
Jani Eväkalio: A prophet, a comedian, an engineer but most importantly, a mentor :)
Sanskar: Just a monkey with a keyboard.
This part of my Summer is called: becoming a Syntactic Seahorse
After this week ended, we had some calls with our mentor, regarding our skills and the project which we were being allotted.
Now we were allocated our projects, and I was working on React Native!!!!
Oh! My! God! The React Native?!! Are you saying that my contributions will be used by millions of people?! I was excited as fuuuuuuck!
This project taught me a lot of things. Probably so many that I can’t cover them in a single blog. Few of them are listed below:
- If you know something never works, it won’t work this time either.
- Focus: Ship your product!
- Bigger teams need more communication structure.
- Sometimes, having difficult conversations is necessary.
- The importance of giving feedback.
But most importantly,
Celebrate learnings, not only successes.
This part of my Summer is called: Getting Syked!!
Now with all the tasks allocated and the goal set, we had to*work*. Yes! Not kidding. We actually had. to. work!
I got an opportunity to work on a project with one of the largest team in our cohort and learn a lot. Shoutouts to the RNTester Gang! 💖
We were supposed to redesign the React Native Tester App and migrate it in an individual package.
I got an opportunity to design an app for the first time and write a lot of code! And guess what, it made into production! Here’s a sneak peek of our design 👀
Throughout the fellowship, I got to work with the core components of the React Native Library, migrate the RNTester to an individual component and a lot lot more.
Sometimes it felt like everything was in abeyance but with the support from my mentor Jani Evakalio, our maintainer Rick Hanlon and determination from the entire team, we made it!
This part of my Summer is called: sticking my ass to my chair and coding my eyes out!
During the course of the fellowship we had the opportunities to attend talks by Awesome Speakers, take part in hacker activities and hack at CTFs!
Did I just mention a CTF?! I got an opportunity to hack in my first ever CTF and we JS Did That :p .
We also had a halfway hackathon which allowed us to take a break from all the heavy coding which we were doing throughout the fellowship!
For the hackathon, we took on one of the Hardest Projects I have done to date. I couldn’t be prouder of what we were able to achieve.
We created a project called Incog.ly which aimed at removing the bias from any interview process.
Read more about the project here.
Also, we were finalists again!!
We have open-sourced our project, contributions are much appreciated ❤
This part of my Summer is called: Taking a Break 😌
After all the grit and the hard work, I was finally able to land my work in React Native!
After landing my code to the React Native Master, me to every React Native job interviewer.
This part of my Summer was called: Becoming a Gangsta! 🤘
Finally, we realised that time was never a linear quantity. Time flew by in a jiffy, and we were close to wrapping up.
We had our final standup, our final show and tell and had our final retrospective.
This was the most wholesome meeting I’ve attended in my entire life.❤️
And this part of my Summer, this part right there is called: MLH Fellowship a.k.a happyness ❤
Thank you to the entire MLH community! ✨ This was hands down one of my best experiences till date.
As a part of the MLH culture and with some Syntactic Seahorse Pizzaz Let us all clap this out and press F in the chat to end this blog.❤
