MLH Fellowship Insider: Week 1
--
This summer, I’m doing the Major League Hacking (MLH) Site Reliability Engineering Fellowship which is run in partnership with Meta. The MLH Fellowship is a 12 week technical program where fellows complete an educational curriculum, build open source software, and receive mentorship from professional engineers to learn more about the world of site reliability engineering. I wanted to journal my experience as I go through the program and share it to provide more insights for anyone interested in applying!
Week 1
It’s orientation week and I join meetings with the other fellows in my pod, my pod leader, and mentors. There are 12 fellows in my pod and everyone comes with different software experiences and are located all around the world. Some fellows are in the earlier years of undergrad, recently graduated, are doing their masters, changing careers, and more. We’re getting to know each other and each other’s software passions. I’m really excited by the group! Everyone here is so cool and I’m really looking forward to working with them!
Our 2 mentors are product engineers (i.e., site reliability engineers) at Meta. One works with generative AI infrastructure and the other works with hardware and validating GPU hosts. They’ll be assigning us our open source software projects later this summer and I’m curious if the projects will be very related to what both of them are doing at Meta.
The fellowship uses an online platform to deliver the educational curriculum. Through it, we do readings, watch videos, answer questions, and assignments. In week 1, it was reading more about what site reliability engineering is, good coding practices, and using GitHub.
We get assigned to groups of 3 to build a website using Python/Flask as our orientation project. It’s my first time working with Flask and Python for web development and I like how using them, you can get a website up and running quickly. My team and I had a call to discuss our design for the website. We’re now working on building it for the due date this upcoming Wednesday. With this project, we practice using branching and GitHub issues/code reviews/PRs.
Week 1 was a nice and engaging week of getting oriented, meeting people, and working through content at my own pace. I’m excited for week 2!
