Last September we welcomed our second cohort of students from MLH Fellowship powered by Major League Hacking. AWS Amplify was part of the inaugural MLH cohort last Summer and it was a great experience — you can read about it here.

In this cohort, we welcomed five students to our JavaScript team and CLI team as open source contributors to help reproduce issues, solve bugs and build new features based on developer feedback. We tracked their work on a public GitHub project board to stay in the true spirit of Open Source Software (OSS). The Fellows closed over 40+ GitHub issues, which directly impacted our customers and the open source community.

Building Amplify as Open Source Software has given us many advantages — for one, it’s enabled us to accelerate development and work alongside our developers. We are always on the lookout for initiatives to grow our open source community.

As COVID started to affect student internships Worldwide, the folks at Major League Hacking (MLH) started to crank away on a clever alternative — pair eager and passionate student technologists with open source libraries who are interested in mentoring and investing in first time contributors. The MLH Fellowship was born. They narrowed the inaugural class to 144 from receiving over 20,000 applicants.

This summer we had the pleasure of mentoring and working with four MLH fellows. We split the students by assigning half to our JavaScript Repo and the other half to our CLI Repo.