Hello everyone! I’m Shubham Upadhyay, Hackathon Community Manager at MLH in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Let me give a quick introduction about myself and take you through my roller-coaster journey starting from college to working at MLH.

I graduated from SRM University in May 2020 with a specialization in Computer Science. Like most other graduates in India, I was really unsure about what to do, but since Computer Science was something that was really popular, I went ahead with it. Who knew I’d be in for a treat?

But to be honest, I was still unsure about what to do next. Ever since  I attended my first hackathon, which was organized by the Google Developer Group in Chennai, I got a knack for hackathons and started loving to contribute towards supporting Open Source projects.  

With that, I started my community contribution with Mozilla Foundation on their Internet Health initiative where we were teaching about the digital footprints that we leave on the internet. This is how I began the footwork in building developer communities. While I was in university, I also joined a couple of other developer communities like….I also started organizing hackathons & meetups at my university and in the region. If there’s anything that I learned about developer communities in those days, it was because of being a part of these organizations and working with fellow community members. 

College life went great, but later down the line, I realized and asked myself, what am I going to do after these 4 years of college? Just when I was exploring various domains, I met this person who was my college senior. Thanks to him, he was the one who introduced me to community manager & developer relations as a career option. We really got along and talked about the different aspects of hackathons and their community culture. Sharing a great bond and similar thoughts, we decided to work together and organize India’s first open-source hackathon and developer relations conference — Hackference India.

There I was, taking my next step into professional developer communities. While doing so, I got a lot closer to community building and understood the business aspects of building a community, while also impacting the cultural and marketing aspects of their organizations.

Eureka! Within no time, I had figured out all of what I wanted to do once I stepped out of college. 

You got it right!

After I graduated I was sure about pursuing a role in Developer Community Management. I packed my bags, moved to Bangalore, and started my journey with Skillenza as a Program Manager. It was a great start with an amazing opportunity to work with different organizations like Microsoft, AWS, Snapchat, and Automation Anywhere running their hackathons and developer programs. How was I involved with them? Well, that is the beauty of building communities; You meet people from different places with a specific goal, where we all wanted to create an impact in the developer ecosystem. I did this by closely working with their DevRel teams. I facilitated around 30 meetups and 10 Hackathons in different cities around India for these organizations. This helped me to develop a deeper understanding of the different aspects of the developer communities in different regions around India.

Later, I moved on from Skillenza to Nanoheal where I had a short stint of being involved with the Community and Marketing teams. Things were going great! What else would I ask for?

But guess what?

I found out from one of my friends that MLH was hiring for a hackathon community manager in the APAC region. I could not miss this opportunity!

I was super excited about it! Being associated with communities and having organized multiple hackathons in the past, I have always admired MLH. And BINGO! Now that my dream has become a reality, I am honored to be a part of this rocket ship.

If you’re interested in discussing developer communities, career options or even need some guidance, hit me up at shubham@mlh.io or DM on Twitter @iamshubhamu. Happy hacking!

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Hello everyone! I’m Joanna Youssef, MLH Hackathon Community Manager at Major League Hacking (MLH). When I was 10, I was convinced that I was a genius. Not even a child genius, but a rival to the great names cited in every K-12 textbook in the tristate area – I was untouchable! What is it that caused this era of delusion, you might ask? HTML and CSS, of course. AKA The Dangerous Decorating Duo, The Marvelous Markup Mix, The Contagious Coding Cohort, and my personal fave: The Reason I found MLH. 

My “inspect-element” discovery of HTML and the power it held catapulted me into a new world, one that felt like a secret. Should I be able to edit this? How could I change the text on this webpage so easily, surely this is a mistake, right? So many questions and only 45 minutes a week to ask my high school CS teacher. It was evident, fairly quickly, that HTML was not the reigning supreme of web development. HTML and CSS were still my first love, but my achilles heel was revealed, I was *not* in fact a genius for discovering how to edit my 2011 Tumblr blog. In fact, I had barely scratched the surface. Infinite scroll, automatic image galleries, music that plays automatically on every page?? Now that was TRUE power! How do I do that?? One word: coding. 

I was ready to learn more! But it was the summer and I was left to learn on my own – that was until I found out about hackathons. A marathon, but for people who don’t want to run!! Perfect. I entered my first hackathon with no clue about the wonders of programming; through mini-events and workshops, I was already feeling like I could tackle the unknown. Hackathons were the secret sauce I needed to make my perfect knowledge sandwich. With an environment designed to fuel your creative juices (with both food AND ideas) I was flourishing! By the end of the event I had learned skills I didn’t even know existed; from python to Github, I had absorbed more in 24hrs than I did all school year.

When I submitted my final project for the demo, I checked off “receive newsletters from MLH,” eager to get back into as many hackathons as possible.

Saying goodbye to high school hackathons, I attended the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where I earned my degree in Information Technology with a specialization in Cyber Security & a minor in CS. Without MLH’s event lineup and their newsletters keeping the best events on my radar, I don’t think I would ever know such an avenue existed. I got to attend my first college hackathon– HackNJIT– where I really got to immerse myself in all things hackathons. I had (again) barely scratched the surface of hackathons and was so ecstatic to attend as many as I could.

And I did!! This was only the beginning– several hackathons, a degree, and one shiny MLH job app later, I had now Uno-reversed my journey and began my new trip: The One with MLH.

I’m super excited to be a part of the MLH community that gets to help hackers and organizers learn, build, and share their hackathons with other curious and creative minds. Can’t wait to see the next one– hope to see ya there!

Happy Hacking!!

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Hello everyone! I’m Maria Dunning, MLH Hackathon Community Manager at Major League Hacking (MLH), and this is my journey from student hacker to joining MLH full-time!

I started attending hackathons in 2016 after my Intro to Computer Science class at The University of Texas at Dallas had a guest come to our classroom to talk about different ways to learn new technologies. TAMUHack was my first hackathon, and I learned a lot that weekend. Not only did my team pivot project ideas multiple times, but we also had to change platforms. One of my recommendations for new hackers is to download IDE’s ahead of time even if you may not use them because it is easier to do the download at home and just set up at the event instead of trying to download on the event wifi. While possible, it is a boring delay when you want to start coding with your team. It was also my first introduction to cup stacking, which quickly became my favorite mini-event at any of the hackathons I attended. 

In 2018, after attending a few more hackathons and a Local Hack Day near me, I applied to become a Coach with MLH and was accepted into the program. My first event was Lumohacks which was also my first time out of the country! Something about being a Coach worked well with my schedule and let me travel and attend even more events where I could help other hackers.

I also got involved in organizing my university’s event, HackUTD, as Logistics Coordinator. Our main focus was to switch our longstanding venue to the new computer science building and figure out how to coordinate the largest hackathon in North Texas. The year after that I became Director. One aspect I was particularly proud of was the increase in sponsor involvement and workshops to give more learning opportunities before and during the event. I also brought my team to Hackcon VII, to help prepare the next generation of our organizers.

In January 2019, I became a GitHub Campus Expert and hosted a few workshops at local hackathons to give new hackers an introduction to git and GitHub, one of what I consider the most important starting points for working together with a team and keeping good version control. I was also able to meet other Campus Experts at Hackcon and later that year at GitHub Universe, a developer conference in San Francisco.

Later in 2019, I went to the Grace Hopper Celebration, a conference for women in technology,  in Florida where I found my full-time job at GEICO Technology Solutions. After graduating from the University of Texas at Dallas, I stopped Coaching with MLH for 2 years and moved to Maryland to focus on my first full-time job, but ended up missing hackathons too much. I started the process to come back to weekend coaching in December of 2021. 

Attending events again rekindled my interest in doing more hackathon-related work, and after talking with a few full-time MLHers, I applied for Hackathon Community Manager, and here I am today! With experience at 30 hackathons in varying roles as attendee, organizer, mentor, and MLH Coach, I am looking forward to helping empower even more hackers!

Happy Hacking! Stay connected with me on LinkedIn.

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