Major League Hacking is a company that runs student hackathons and writes about organizing and judging them.
HN commenters mention it as a student hackathon league and link its events; others say it follows good hackathon practice, like CodeDay.
Major League Hacking | Engineering & Marketing Roles | Full Time, Part Time | Onsite, Remote | http://mlh.io
We work with the largest community of student developers in the world to help them become amazing hackers. Major League Hacking (MLH) works with student organizers across the globe to put on events on their campus. We're a B-Corp that's been around for four years and work with 200+ events per year for 65,000 students.
We're currently hiring a full time software engineer and looking for some part time help with marketing & copywriting.
Full-Stack Software Engineer (Full-time, NYC): We're looking for an engineer to help us write and maintain software that helps us empower hackers, working across frontend (HTML/CSS/JS) and backend (Rails). We're a small team and you'd have the ability to help guide the engineering products from start to finish while working with an accomplished senior engineer. - More and Apply: https://careers.mlh.io/jobs/product/full-stack-engineer/
Creative Copywriter (Part-time, Remote): We are looking for a creative copywriter to help us craft compelling brand and product messaging. Ideally, we are seeking someone we can work with in an ongoing basis. Examples of projects you might write copy for: presentations & collateral, product landing pages, transactional emails, marketing emails & social media. More and Apply: https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~01c76be90835df5c53
An inspiring read - I know of so many people that got dragged to their first hackathon thanks to persistent friends, myself included!
Every single hackathon I've been to since have inspired me in one way or another - be it trying out the latest tech, the buzz from working on a hack over a short period of time, or just meeting & sharing the weekend with super awesome people!
The hacker ethos is extremely transferrable as well, it's a mindset I promote a lot when I teach Computing to my secondary school students in the UK. It's all about getting the learners to take control of their own education & be as creative as they want about it.
Proud to have MLH at the forefront of revolutionising how students learn, build and share ideas around technology. Very excited to be part of this growing global community and cannot wait to see what's to come!
If you're in the EU, I would highly recommend checking out these upcoming hackathons (drag a friend along too!): http://mlh.io/eu/
I dropped out of high school at 15 and moved out at 16. Currently 21 and running https://hackclub.com.
I know that when I was in his shoes, I felt like I tried everything to find meaning (community college classes, reading books, learning new subjects, etc), but it took me literally moving out and into a group house in San Francisco to find a community of other people like me (see https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-06-07/real-teenagers-silicon-valley/ for my story).
I think it's all about finding like-minded peers that push you. If he's into computer science, perhaps there are hackathons near him? Or maybe he'd get value out of our Slack (https://slack.hackclub.com)? We have a lot of students like him in our community.
We put together https://hackathons.hackclub.com to aggregate high school hackathons and https://mlh.io/seasons/na-2019/events is the best resource for college hackathons if it's helpful.
Loved this story. I can completely sympathize. I had been programming in school and for fun a little before my first hackathon, however I had not yet made any "real" apps. I attended my first hackathon a few years ago (pretty sure Jon was there). Like Jon, I joined a team of people with much more experienced than myself. They taught me a lot, helped me get started, and got me hooked on hackathons. After this hackathon, I started learning about web development, meeting others in the community, and of course attending more hackathons.
If you are at all interested in programming or learning how to program, I encourage you to attend a hackathon. Check out some great ones here: http://mlh.io/events/
I've been saying this for a few months now. Although I love what the learn2code movement is trying to do, what people really want is to learn how to build things.
To facilitate this, we started Major League Hacking (http://mlh.io), the NCAA of Hackathons. Since it's inception last year, we've had over 10,000 students take part in MLH Hackathons.
A large number of those students had never built something before. Many didn't even code when they arrived. Once you show someone what they can build, it becomes infinitely easier to convince them to learn2code.
Depends what you're into and where you are, but these are the ones I'm keeping an eye on:
https://devpost.com/hackathons
https://www.eventbrite.com/d/online/hackathon/
https://mlh.io/seasons/2023/events
https://www.iquise.mit.edu/iQuHACK/2023-01-27
Itch.io is where I'd start for game jams:
https://itch.io/jams
If you happen to be near Germany/Europe and into games then I had fun at the Berlin Mini Jam when I went pre-pandemic:
https://www.meetup.com/game-developers-berlin/