MLH Fellowship - My Experience

I never imagined that one day I will be sharing my MLH Fellowship experience. I feel so proud to be part of the MLH Fellowship. It really helped me to build my portfolio and connections.
In this blog post, I will share how I get into this program, how exactly it helped me with my career, and what I learned?

I'll not cover program details such as the recruitment process, program timeline, etc because I already made a Podcast 🎤 on it. You can check it out HERE 🎤🎤🎤

My Major League Hacking Experience

When I heard about Fellowship for the first time, I visited the website, took a look, and closed it thinking I am not good enough to apply for this program. Yes, I actually thought that.
A week later, I saw a Facebook post about it in the Facebook Developer Circles group, which excited me and I thought let's give it a try. Surprisingly, I was selected for the program 🎉🎉

Before starting my Fellowship journey, I had no idea how can I contribute to a project. I had no guts to even look at a project's source code.
Here's the improvement

MLH Fellowship gave me the confidence to contribute to any open-source project. I now love to take a look at source code, report issues, or fix them by Opening Pull Requests.

Not only this but it improved my Portfolio as well. I recently received a job offer from a company without even applying for it. They were looking for Nextjs Developer and my contributions to Nextjs helped me appearing on their search.

Project Details

In the Fellowship program, I worked on Nextjs, an open-source ReactJs based Framework that I'm in love with. Most of my contributions were in the form examples, I added new examples that users can use as boilerplate, modified existing ones, and improved some performance by modifying Nextjs Prefetch Function.

Additional Thoughts / Feelings / Stories

There is something special about MLH which made me fell in love with this community and that is the support. MLH is extremely supportive. Huge shoutouts to Will Rusell and Leah Caputo.