The Halfway Hackathon takes place halfway through the fellowship. It's an opportunity to put everything you've been learning into practice and to expand your network beyond your Pod. You'll collaborate with a small team on an Open Source hackathon project that will benefit current and future fellows.
Theme
Teams will be challenged to create hacks that "Improve the MLH Fellowship Experience" for current and future fellows. As fellows, you are the world's leading experts on how to make the fellowship experience even better. Open Sourcing your work will enable future classes of fellows to build upon and continue your efforts for years to come!
Categories
Within the theme of Improving the MLH Fellowship Experience, we have identified the following categories to help guide you. One project will be selected as the winner from each of them:
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Community Building – Create a project that helps foster connections between fellows, mentors, and maintainers.
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Showcase / Portfolio – Create a project that helps fellows showcase the work they are doing during the fellowship (including both hackathon projects and Open Source contributions).
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Remote Work / Tooling – Create a project that helps fellows collaborate successfully and get the most out of their remote environment.
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Navigating the Fellowship – Create a project that helps fellows successfully navigate the fellowship day-to-day.
You can submit your project to as many categories as you'd like as long as you can justify how it meets the description. However, a single project cannot win more than one category
Timeline
- Tuesday, March 2nd at 3PM GMT: Team Building – This will be a chance to form a team and meet other Fellows from other Pods.
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Monday, March 8th: Hackathon Kickoff – During this event we’ll go over the theme, categories, prizes, and rules. Afterward we'll answer any questions and ensure that everyone has formed teams of 3-4 fellows.
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Monday, March 8th - Monday, March 15th: Hacking – Between the end of your hackathon kickoff and the beginning of your hackathon demos on Friday, you should be collaborating with your team on your project.
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Monday, March 15th: Hackathon Demos – All of the fellows in your region will come together to show off their projects during a series of live demos on Zoom.
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Monday, March 15th to Thursday, March 18th: Hackathon Judging – Judges will review the project submissions from each category and select a winner for each one.
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Friday, March 19th: Winner Announcement – We'll host a livestream where we play the video demos from the top teams and announce the winners for each category.
Eligibility
You must be a member of the MLH Fellowship Batch 2 Open Source Program in order to be eligible to participate.
Unfortunately, Explorer and Externship Fellows are not eligilbe.
Requirements
As part of your submission, you’ll need to complete the following:
- Publish your project on GitHub with an appropriate Open Source license
- Record a 3-5 minute video overview and demo of your project.
Prizes
Best Community Building Project
Amazon Echo Dot and MLH Swag
Best Remote Work / Tooling Project
Amazon Echo Dot and MLH Swag
Best Showcase / Portfolio
Amazon Echo Dot and MLH Swag
Best Navigating the Fellowship
Amazon Echo Dot and MLH Swag
Devpost Achievements
Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:
Judges

Wei He
Batch 1 Fellow

Saurabh Kumar Suryan
Batch 1

Nyior Clement
Batch 1

Nitish Gadangi
Batch 1

Boyu Jiang
Batch 1

Shivay Lamba
Batch 1

Shubhank Saxena
Batch 1

Shreya Gupta
Batch 1

Yash Khare
Batch 1

Rishiraj Singh Chhabra
Batch 1

Chirag Singhal
Batch 0

Sebastian Crossa
Batch 0

Grace Gao
Batch 1

Kenneth Aladi
Batch 0

Garima Singh
Batch 1

Ajwad Shaikh
Batch 1

Temitope Akinsoto
Batch 0

Muhammad Saad
Batch 1

Ankit Maity
Batch 1

Ruby Werman
Batch 0

Samuel Obe
Batch 0

Vividha
Batch 1

Anshul Goyal
Batch 0

Aksh Gupta
Batch 1

Harsh Bardhan Mishra
Batch 1

Aditya Raman
Batch 1

Abhishek Chaurasia
Batch 1

Aayush Joglekar
Batch 1

Rahul Tarak
Batch 1

Gagan Deep
Batch 1

Yoseph Ahmed
Batch 0, Batch 1

Nenad Pantelić
Batch 1

Laveesh Gupta
Batch 0

Vrushti Mody
Batch 1
Judging Criteria
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Adherence to the Theme
How well did this project fit the overall theme of the event and the category of submission? -
Technology
How technically impressive was the hack? Was the technical problem the team tackled difficult? Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components? Did the technology involved make you go "Wow"? -
Design
Did the team put thought into the user experience? How well designed is the interface? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. For a hardware project, it might be more about how good the human-computer interaction is? -
Completion
Does the hack work? Did the team achieve everything they wanted? -
Learning
Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? What kind of projects have they worked on before? -
Open Source Best Practices
Did the team apply the Open Source best practices including, but not limited to, use of branches, pull requests, reviewing each other’s code, writing a comprehensive README, and using issues to track tasks.
Questions? Email the hackathon manager
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