Applying to MLH Fellowship - Tips & Tricks

Siddhi Bhanushali — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 11:05:39 +0000

I was at the college and got the news that I have been accepted into MLH Fellowship Prep Track (Oct Batch). I was really happy to see that !

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What is MLH Fellowship?
MLH Fellowship is a fully remote, 12-week internship where participants earn a stipend and learn to collaborate on real open source projects with peers and engineers from top companies.

What is MLH Prep Fellowship ?
The MLH Fellowship Prep Program is a 3-week preparation program for aspiring technologists who are interested in experiencing the fellowship before committing to the full 12-weeks. You'll build out your portfolio of personal projects & experiment with new technologies by collaborating in small groups through a short hackathon sprint.

Application process for the Prep fellowship
You are asked to submit 3 essays and a code sample that showcases your skills. Let's talk about the essays first. Make sure you folks show that you are passionate about the fellowship as well as technology. Your first essay is all about how MLH Fellowship will help you grow and why you want to be a fellow. Your second essay is about what efforts can you do for the community or what all you can bring in for the community. The third essay is all about yourself. Try to add in your experience and all the community work you have done. The essays should be descriptive and the team should get to know about you and your skills. Now let's talk about the code sample. There are some requirements for your code sample that needs to be followed.
Code Sample Requirements:

Representative: The sample should be representative of your abilities. If you’re submitting a group project, make sure you contributed a substantial amount of code. Projects that are based mostly on a tutorial aren’t representative of your own abilities.
Existing sample: This is code that you wrote for a purpose other than this application. Public on GitHub: Your sample should be viewable on GitHub publicly. If you can’t make the repository public, convert your code to a secret GitHub Gist instead.
Multiple files: Your sample should consist of multiple files and be of substance. It’s hard to have a conversation about a single function.
Not too large: It’s difficult to have a conversation about a mono-repo with dozens of microservices. It should be immediately clear what you contributed to the sample. Dense frameworks with lots of boilerplate such as Django or Laravel don’t usually make for good code samples. Lightweight frameworks such as Flask and Express are good examples.
The real problem: Your sample should solve a real problem or accomplish a real goal. While some class projects will meet this criterion, most won’t. There’s nothing wrong with the binary search tree you wrote, but it’ll be hard for your interviewers to get to know you through that kind of sample.
No Jupyter notebooks: We need to see your ability to write a project that an end-user can use. It should be deployable. We don’t accept Jupyter notebooks or other exploratory code samples because it’s difficult to have a conversation about your coding skills with these.

Tips for the code sample

Make sure your code sample shows your latest skills.
Your code sample should be well documented (README).
Make sure you comment your code.
Use good variable and function names. Make sure that describes what are you trying to achieve through that function or variable.

As soon as you clear the reviewing phase,you will be invited for a short interview.
I hope all these tips helped you, if it did consider buying me a coffee here

You can connect with me here
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddhi-bhanushali
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Git Series - Part I

Siddhi Bhanushali — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 08:54:30 +0000

Learning git is always a plus point. It has many advantages ,some of them are as follows :

You can contribute to open source projects.
You can collaborate with your friends to make a project.
Contributing to open source will open new doors of opportunities for you.

In this part , I will be covering how you can push your code to github from your local computer/laptop. So let's get started.
You have to install git inorder to run these commands. Link to install Git
After that you need to open a github account and make a empty repository over there so that you can push the code there.
Now think of a buffet system. The first step is to clean the place and arrange the food on the tables. The same step is followed here , first we have to make it a git repository and then we can start pushing the code.

1. Initializing a git repository

Now if you want to convert your local project/folder into a git repository, you have to first initialize it to a git repository. The command for it is

git init

2. Adding the code to staging area.

Consider the same example of buffet system . After arranging food we ask the people to form a line. So this is what we are doing here as well. We are asking our code to stay in the staging area. The command for this is

git add .

The . here represents that we are adding all the files in staging area, you can explicitly mention the file name as well.

3. Check the status of your files

If we consider the example of buffet system again , so before taking the food we check the status, if it's available yet or not. So sometimes we need to check the status of our files , if they are all in staging area or not. The command for the same is

git status

4. Permanently save your changes

Now if you consider the buffet example, it's time to add food to our plates. So in this step we are saving the files permanently to our git history. This is called commiting the code. The command for the same is

git commit -m "initial commit"

Here -m means the commit message . You always have to specify a commit message while committing the code.

5. Specify the destination where you have to push the code.

If you consider the buffet example, if you don't know which food is served where then how will you eat the food, you need to know the destination. Same happens with our code, if you want to push code ,you need to specify where? The command for the same is

git remote add origin <url of the repository on github>

Here origin is just a name for the destination url.
So here we are specifying the destination.

6. It's time to push the code

Now it's time to eat our food . Yeah🎊🎊. Finally we reached to our last step wherein we will be pushing our code to the destination. The command for the same is

git push origin master

Here we are pushing the code to origin which is our destination and we are pushing it on master branch. I will be talking more about branches in the next part of the series.

So, these were the steps to follow so that you can make a new repository and push the code from your local computer. On the next parts of the series we will be talking about branches, issues, pull requests and how to contribute to an existing project. Your feedbacks are much appreciated.

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