This will be your first opportunity to collaborate with the other fellows in your Pod on a software project and put some of what you’ve been learning into practice! 

You’ll use Git & GitHub best practices to build a portfolio website with your pod!

You'll spend the first 3-4 days of the week making pull requests to your Pods Portfolio template. Your Pod Leader will review changes and provide feedback.

After a few days, you'll generate your very own portfolio website and make it your own. You can see how our Will from the Program Team made his own website using it here: willr.uk

Contributing to your pod portfolio

You'll be working on your Pod portfolio during the week, adding new features or improving existing functionality. You'll need to leave a comment on an existing issue to say you're working on it, or make a new Issue for a different feature.

When your feature is ready, make a Pull Request and your Pod Leader will work with you to merge it in.

Making your own pod portfolio website

You'll now get the chance to make your very own portfolio website using the template. Your website should display your personality in it and show who you really are!

By the end of this week, you should accomplish the following:

  1. Learn web technologies to add a feature to a website

  2. Practiced collaborating on a project on GitHub using best practices

  3. Expanded your network by collaborating with fellows from your Pod

Timeline

The Orientation Hackathon takes place during your first week of the fellowship. The kickoff will take place at the end of your first Pod meeting and demos will take place at the beginning of your first meeting during your second week.

  • Orientation Hackathon Kickoff – During this event, we’ll reveal the the task in mind and help you form teams of 1-2 fellows.

  • Contributing – Between the end of your orientation hackathon kickoff and the beginning of Friday's stand up, you should be working with your team to work on your pods portfolio site.

  • Building your portfolio – From Friday's stand up, you'll begin to work on your very own portfolio site if you haven't already. Fellows are welcome to begin earlier in the week!

Submission

You will submit all the contributions you made to your Pod's portfolio site as your submission, linking all the pull requests you made. Teams who demonstrate excellent communication, team work and good use of Git/GitHub may win themselves a prize!

Requirements

As you know, you have until the beginning of your hackathon demos to work on your project. As part of your submission, you’ll need to complete the following:

  1. Publish your project on GitHub with an appropriate Open Source license

  2. Record a 3-5 minute video overview and demo of your project.

Publishing Your Project on GitHub

Before demos the repository should be set to public and should have an appropriate README and LICENSE included. One of the criteria that you will be evaluated on is your use of Git and GitHub best practices, so also try to make sure your commit history is visible on the repository.

Recording Your Video Demo

A day or so before the Demos you should plan to record a video demo of your project. While you’ll do a live demo with your Pod, the videos will be shared with the full fellowship, and the judges for the global competition will see the videos from the top team from each Pod.

During this video demo (and probably your live demo too) you should aim to cover the following key pieces of information. 

  • Project Name & Tagline - The name of your project and a 1-2 sentence tagline describing it.

  • Project Overview – A more detailed written description of the project. Aim for 3-5 paragraphs about the problem you were trying to solve, how you approached it, and what you built.

  • Techonologies Used  – A list of any technologies you used when building the project.

  • Pod Number and Team Member Names – Your Pod’s number and a list of your team members.

Full page can be found here.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

Top Portfolio Sites (7)

Amazon Echo Dot + MLH Swag

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Will Russell

Will Russell
Program Manager

Judging Criteria

  • Best Practices
    Did the team apply the best practices including, but not limited to, use of branches, pull requests, reviewing each other’s code, writing a comprehensive README, and using issues to track tasks.
  • Contribution
    Did the team contribute lots to the pod portfolio, clearly
  • Teamwork
    Did the team work effectively with each other, to build the feature
  • Learning
    Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? If a team which always does virtual reality projects decides to switch up and try doing a mobile app instead, that exploration should be rewarded.
  • Completion
    Did the team finish their contributions?

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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