Halfway Hackathon

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:

  1. Community Building – Create a project that helps foster connections between fellows, mentors, and maintainers.

  2. Learning New Skills – Create a project that helps fellows learn and master new skills. These can be software engineering, career, or general life skills.

  3. Getting Help – Create a project that helps fellows to get unstuck or collect feedback quickly when they need it.

  4. Remote Work / Tooling – Create a project that helps fellows collaborate successfully and get the most out of their remote environment.

  5. 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).

  6. 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

  • Monday, July 13th: 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.

  • Monday, July 13th - Friday, July 17th: 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.

  • Friday, July 17th: 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.

  • Monday, July 20th: Hackathon Judging – Judges will review the project submissions from each category and select a winner for each one.

  • Tuesday, July 21st: Winner Announcement – We'll host a livestream where we play the video demos from the top teams and announce the winners for each category.

View full rules

Prizes

$315 in prizes

Best Community Building Project

For a team that wins this category, each team member will receive 3 months of Discord Nitro and $30 for the GitHub Store.

Best Learning New Skills Project

For a team that wins this category, each team member will receive 3 months of Discord Nitro and $30 for the GitHub Store.

Best Getting Help Project

For a team that wins this category, each team member will receive 3 months of Discord Nitro and $30 for the GitHub Store.

Best Remote Working / Tooling Project

For a team that wins this category, each team member will receive 3 months of Discord Nitro and $30 for the GitHub Store.

Best Showcase / Portfolio Project

For a team that wins this category, each team member will receive 3 months of Discord Nitro and $30 for the GitHub Store.

Best Navigating the Fellowship Project

For a team that wins this category, each team member will receive 3 months of Discord Nitro and $30 for the GitHub Store.

Best Tool to Help Fellows Find Jobs

For a team that wins this category, each team member will receive 3 months of Discord Nitro and $30 for the GitHub Store.

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Eligibility

You must be a member of the MLH Fellowship in order to be eligible to participate.

Requirements

As part of your submission, you’ll need to complete the following:

  1. Publish your project on GitHub with an appropriate Open Source license
  2. Record a 3-5 minute video overview and demo of your project.
  3. Submit the team questionnaire about your project on Devpost

Judges

To be confirmed

To be confirmed

Judging Criteria

  • 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.