2020 was a weird year for me and everyone else. All of a sudden the real world turned into a virtual pool of online existence. I found this to be a great opportunity to explore the various open-source events that once required a real-world interaction traveling from place to place, but now replaced with Zoom, Google meets, etc. So I started my journey to gain knowledge and experience just with the help of my Laptop and Mobile hotspot.
In the month of March 2020, I started exploring GitHub. At the same time, I came across Major League Hacking, or MLH, the official league for Students’ hackathon. My first MLH hackathon that I’d participated in was “Hack The Chain”. After that, I started to participate every weekend and interact with the community members in the Discord Server regularly. I teamed up with a varied range of people with different Tech Stacks, backgrounds, and time-zones. I got to work with middle-school tensai as well as Software Engineers from Asia, North America, and Europe. It was an overwhelming, yet exciting experience. I also participated in community events and workshops every weekend. I joined in Zoom calls with different community members in various events. Very soon I was quite prominent in the community (in a short period of time) because of my active participation and collaboration with other hackers and organizers (P.S everything was happening through a Discord server only).
In the month of June, MLH was organizing their first MLH Summer League event exclusive to students in high school and below. MLH opened their Mentorship form for the University students for that hackathon, so I applied to it and got accepted easily. And that’s how I entered into the Mentors’ circle at MLH and my mentorship journey started.
I believe that Mentoring is a great opportunity to learn. I learned some parts of Django, VueJS, Angular JS, Blockchain, echoAR SDKs, Google Cloud, MongoDB Atlas, Raspberry PI, Radar SDKs and APIs, and many other tools, that were not part of my Tech Stack, while helping to fix bugs and errors in codes of different hackers (participants in a hackathon are referred to as hackers).
One of the most important aspects of being a mentor that I learned was Patience. It’s not very comfortable to understand other people’s code written in a hurry during a limited time of 24 or 48 hours hackathon to build something. Most of such codes are not well maintained and are very sophistically written due to hits and trials, and rapid modifications (such as testing a snippet of code from stack overflow, medium, etc.).
But being a mentor, sometimes I had to Git clone (P.S we use GitHub to share codes in hackathons) other people’s codebases to install and run on my system to check further to fix bugs or give suggestions. So it was a time-taking and patience-testing task. But, do you know what’s motivating in all these? Reading other people’s codes gave me the opportunity to learn minor tricks that people use in their codes on their codebases for easier implementation of their software (P.S the codes are Open Source).
These shortcuts and tricks cannot be learned easily from YouTube tutorials or any such vast explanatory platforms. Moreover, sometimes I also shared my own tricks and shortcuts to be applied in their projects to fix bugs or improve any component in their codebase. So being a Mentor also gave me the opportunity to contribute to many projects directly or indirectly while helping the hackers. It’s always so exciting to see wonderful ideas turning into implementation within a hackathon. As a mentor, helping the hackers code their ideas into a working product, is the most amazing experience. Maybe one day the built product can turn into the next FAANG.
Other than giving technical assistance to hackers, Mentors play a huge role in guiding the hackers through the procedure of the hackathon. Mentors are experienced hackers who have participated in various hackathons and understand how hackathons work.
Being a mentor, helped me make lots of connections within as well as outside of the community. I got the opportunity to connect with amazing colleagues from all across the world. Some are big shots and some are highly skilled fellows, but everyone has the same spirit and love for MLH. Being in the Mentors’ circle at MLH, makes it feel like a family.
In the end, we all prove our teamwork and work our best to make every hackathon a success. I’d like to end this blog by stating that, my mentorship journey has just begun, and I believe that mentors play an important role in every organization.