It's been 3 Sprints, which is 3 sprints x 2 weeks = 6 weeks, of starting the MLH Explorer Fellowship back in the first week of October 2020. I wanted to share some thoughts and lessons right before starting the second half of the program.
My pod
What's the MLH Fellowship
I was selected to participate in Batch 1 and as the web page describes pretty well, it's a 12-week program to level up your skills and build your portfolio under the guidance of a mentor. You're assigned into a "pod" of ~10 people that will become your teammates during the fellowship.
For the case of the Explorer Fellowship, the kind of entry-level program, you'll work in 2-week long Hackathon Sprints, in which you're given a theme and an engineering focus, such as Git, Documentation, Testing, or Deployment. The themes are kept secret for each Sprint but so far we have had Education, Gaming, and Data, AI & Machine Learning (hey, if anyone at MLH is reading this and shouldn't have shared the themes (?), they were public on Devpost!).
Sprint themes are the secret sauce of the fellowship because they could be unexpected (like Gaming hehe). They force you out of your zone of comfort and make you go the extra mile.
Quick lessons
1. Time Management is everything
The number one blocker during Sprint 1. I'd lie if I say I'm as productive as Tom Frank or Gary V., but something that helped me and gave me perspective of my time constraints is to plan my day ahead in detail. Considering rest, eating, work out, and learning times plus the time dedicated to the fellowship work and other duties.
2. There're timezones!
The fellowship is a global effort made by MLH and its partners, it's amazing that people from Latinamerica like me, can interact with someone as far as in India!
For most pods, I think, fellows are put in closer timezones, but if you had never arranged an international meeting be aware of always share your timezone before wards to avoid confusion (credits to Swift).
3. Move fast, try not to break things
As mentioned before and if it wasn't obvious, you're always sprinting (LOL), i.e., learning new things on the go each week and committing to the codebase as fast as possible to get things moving.
4. Not alone
This lesson was the one I got from the last Sprint and yes, it has lots of relation with teamwork, but this time I'd like to talk about mentors. MLH provides industry experts for each Sprint and an assigned mentor to each pod, that I have to say I hadn't made the most out of it. They're there to help and listen, and hopefully, give you a piece of advice that will save you to go in a very time-consuming path.
Also, I think I haven't mentioned this, but fellows are so amazing, really, and may have a completely different background compared to you, and together, the outcome each time is unique. I've really enjoyed working with each one of them.
There're also live sessions with industry experts in which you can interact and connect. I personally hadn't had the chance to attend all of the ones that I would have liked due to the scheduled time (because #timezones) but all of the industry experts and mentors have been awesome (and HD).
Last words
I'm definitely enjoying the fellowship and learning a lot each week. I just wanted to share some thoughts that someone can find useful. From my side, I think the fellowship it's that last kick off and vote of confidence I needed to make a career in Software Engineering and I'm grateful for that. I would recommend all uni students apply and hack your way to make the most out of the program.
Happy Hacking.