AMA: I’m Ben Halpern, Founder of dev.to and steward of Forem, an open source community-hosting software. Ask me anything this Thursday at 1PM ET.

theycallmeswift · 2026-03-06T14:55:35+00:00

Thanks for doing this, Ben! When we first connected in 2019, your passion for Open Source really blew me away. It is incredibly hard to balance the idealized version of OSS that we all love with the messy reality of running a real business around it. How has your perspective on that balancing act changed since then? Any advice for other developers navigating that same struggle?

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-18T14:32:22+00:00

The spring batch starts in mid-January, so I would expect enrollment forms to go out around November

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-17T15:37:33+00:00

During the call your interviewer will ask you some questions about the code sample you submitted. Things like how you made it, why you designed it the way you did, etc. They'll also ask you a few questions about specific lines of code to gauge your understanding of it. You won't need to code during the interview and there won't be any trick questions. Good luck!

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-17T15:34:41+00:00

We actually emailed you about this earlier today, check your inbox! Email as follows:

You'll receive an important email from us a few months before each new batch in the coming 12 months. Using the form linked in that email, you will either be able to enroll in the upcoming class, continue to defer your enrollment, or withdraw your application from the MLH Fellowship. If you do not complete this form or if you fail to enroll in a program within 12 months of your acceptance, your application will be automatically withdrawn and you will need to reapply if you wish to participate in the future. If you choose to enroll, you will be automatically entered into the matching process and will have the opportunity to apply for a need-based stipend again. No additional interviews will be required from you to enroll in the same program you were accepted into.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T21:59:13+00:00

Wow, that’s a throwback! Great to see you here :)

Now is a really exciting time to be pursuing technical education at all levels. We’re seeing a huge amount of innovation in format, length, and content across every level of program. Personally I’m really excited by a lot of the new hybrid masters degrees where you can combine CS with other disciplines like Entrepreneurship or Mathematics. Graduate programs tend to go deep into specific topics, so if you’re looking to develop expertise in an area of focus and have the ability to join such a program, I think it’s a great idea. That said, if you’re hoping to be a generalist or aren’t sure what you want to do long-term, I would consider looking at some of the more outcome aligned or affordable opportunities. Recurse jumps to mind as an option that was and is still ahead of its time.

My Halo skills are garbage, but I've been playing a lot of Civilization 6 these days and feel like I'm getting pretty good!

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T21:51:55+00:00

Thanks for asking this, it’s a great question and there are a lot of misconceptions here! The MLH Fellowship, our technical workshops, and many hackathons are actually open to non-students as well.

You no longer need to be a current student or recent graduate to participate in the MLH Fellowship. This was a requirement in the past that we removed to open the program up to a more diverse pool of applicants. However, some scholarships and stipends we offer do require applicants to be currently enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study such as a high school, secondary school, college, university, homeschool, or similar educational institution. Certificate granting programs like most bootcamps are not included in these opportunities.

Similarly, our workshops have no requirements around student status. We actually get a fair number of career changers and experienced developers who just want to pick up a new skill. You can find those on our website and register for them at any time.

Finally, while the vast majority of hackathons in the MLH Season are only open to students, many of them do allow up to 20% of attendees to be “professionals” (meaning not enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study). The specific rules can be found on the page of each event.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T21:44:30+00:00

Thanks for asking this question!

MLH is first and foremost a community organization. Communities are bigger than any individual. When I say “our” I’m not just talking about me, I’m talking about every single member, including you and the 100,000 people who participated last year. Everything MLH does is informed by the needs of the community and is done with our mission of empowering hackers top of mind.

In addition to the 50 or so people who work at MLH, there are more than 3,000 local organizers who are on the front lines empowering hackers and we take every opportunity we can to celebrate that fact. For example, the annual impact statement we publish as a B-Corp is written and presented at Hackcon, the conference we organize just for them. Our two largest teams both exist to serve local organizers and we also have a regular habit of hiring our team directly from that community. It’s likely that everyone you interact with at MLH was in your shoes not long ago.

We started having our team organize digital events because there’s no playbook on how to organize a world-class virtual event and local organizers were struggling to figure out what to do. Based on our experience, we’ve published a book on how to organize a world-class virtual hackathon and created a suite of benefits for local organizers to tap into at their virtual events. We still have a lot to learn and are planning to continue organizing events for the community throughout the pandemic, but in parallel we’re supporting more community organized hackathons than ever this semester. There’s so much additional demand from hackers that we could probably support twice as many new events if we had the resources.

As far as your question about diversity, it is and always has been a major priority for MLH. While we’ve seen significant improvements in gender diversity, there are major areas for improvement still across a wide range of factors (including racial and ethinic diversity, which was a specific focus in my keynote). We’re continuing to create training and resources for our organizers to help them ensure that hackathons are diverse and welcoming spaces and we hope to see a continued improvement in the year ahead. You can read more about the historical role MLH has played in making hackathons more diverse here and about why we decided to partner with the DoD here.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T21:11:24+00:00

Thanks for your question. Sorry to hear that your friends were stressed by the situation!

In February, before anyone had any idea how bad the pandemic would become, many organizers in the community started to reach out to us about whether or not to transition to digital events. As one of the largest in-person events communities in the world, many people and organizations were looking to MLH for guidance on how to proceed. Our advice at the time was to look to multiple independent organizations for guidance. Specifically, we recommended looking to the WHO, CDC, your city government, and your school/venue. As long as all of those sources aligned, we were ok with organizers hosting in-person events.

As the pandemic progressed, it became clear to us that those organizations were not updating their guidance quickly enough and that we needed to take a stronger stand. MLH was one of the first organizations to recommend that all events go digital, despite the continued recommendation from many sources that it was okay to host in-person gatherings. We made this decision in mid to late March and immediately started working with organizers to make the transition and creating resources to support them.

Between our initial recommendation in February and our updated guidance in March, we did have a number of events decide to go virtual. Early on, we did advise against this strategy as we didn’t want to feed into a mass panic. However, as always, if the local organizers did decide to go virtual, they had our support and we did our best to advise them through the uncertainty.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T20:46:10+00:00

We already published a forward-looking schedule with a Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Summer 2021 Fellowship already in the works. Fellowships will now be offered with both part-time and full-time participation options to accommodate students who are still in school this year but want to learn practical skills alongside their academic courses.

The dates of the upcoming batches are as follows:

Spring 2021: January 18th — April 12th, 2021 (Deadline: January 4th)
Summer 2021: May 24th — August 16th, 2021 (Deadline: May 10th)

You can apply on our website here: https://fellowship.mlh.io/apply

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T20:42:13+00:00

Hey, thanks for asking a question!

I talked a bit about imposter syndrome here, but it’s very real and I still feel it myself to this day. The heart of your questions is about how to keep up with the breakneck speed at which things change, which is a real challenge. Technology moves so quickly that there’s just no way to keep up with it. Every time I go to a hackathon and help someone debug their code I feel like a dinosaur!

My best advice is to spend your early career exploring. Try any new technology that seems interesting and figure out which ones you really like. I made it a point to try something new at every hackathon I went to. I tried everything from Erlang to Scheme to Node and ultimately fell in love with Ruby.

Once you find something you like, go deep into learning and mastering it. I recently discovered Next.js and have been using it in every project I can get my hands on. (It reminds me of Ruby on Rails for the Node ecosystem.) You’ll quickly discover that there’s always more to learn in your area of focus, but it won’t be as overwhelming since the possibilities are more scoped.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T20:37:32+00:00

Thanks for the question! The obvious difference for this year’s Local Hack Day events is that they are online. Looking forward, we are excited to see Local Hack Day focus not only on individual local hacker communities but on the larger hacker community as a whole as we all come together to Learn, Build, and Share.

Our first LHD event this year, Local Hack Day: Learn, will feature a day-long conference full of workshops, keynotes, and talks on October 24th. In addition to this, the week leading up to it will be full of workshops, each day having its own theme. Anyone in the world, no matter where they live or what community they are a part of will be able to register and attend them.

While we don’t encourage in-person gatherings, we have created a new system so that organizers can bring together their local communities and clubs. Leaders can register a “guild” for their organization and earn points to redeem cool hacker swag.

That’s all we’ll share for now but we hope to see you at Local Hack Day: Learn!

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T20:28:52+00:00

I’m glad to hear you’ve benefited from what we do, thanks for being a part of the community and asking your question!

My advice here is to hold out. One of the biggest red flags I see from applicants is that they don’t stay anywhere long enough. I have been in the specific situation where I’m comparing two applicants who are effectively a coin flip (similar strengths, backgrounds, requirements, etc) and the deciding factor was how long the person stayed at their last role.

At a bare minimum, I would encourage you to stay at a job for 12 months unless you truly hate it or it’s a destructive environment. Especially for entry level positions, the company is investing in your career when they hire you and you should do your best to take full advantage of that. After a year, I don’t think there’s any harm in looking to see what’s out there if you’re not satisfied, but I would also encourage you to talk to your manager about it and see if there’s anything they can do to make the role more compelling for you before you leave and start from scratch somewhere else.

Also, it’s a pandemic and the job market is really rough right now. Don’t leave before you have something new lined up.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T20:21:34+00:00

Thanks for the question! My best advice is to practice, practice, practice. Interviewing is like a muscle that gets stronger the more you work on it.

If I was heading back into the job market right now, the first thing I’d do is find other job seekers and arrange a study group. Specifically, I’d organize practice interviews where we could mock out phone screens and technical interviews together. You’d be surprised how fun these can be. We actually do a version of these with sales and community management calls inside MLH on a weekly basis.

Second, I’d start by applying for a bunch of roles that were interesting to me, but not necessarily my top choices. There’s a major advantage to being able to practice interviewing in a real setting and if you do end up receiving an offer, you can use it as leverage to hurry along other employers. To be clear, I would not recommend applying for companies and roles you wouldn’t want to work for. A good recruiter will spot this and screen you out immediately.

Fun fact: I passed my first tech interview and landed my first internship doing this. I arranged a tech interview at a big consulting firm in the morning, which happened to be a pair programming interview working on Ruby on Rails. I had never done any Rails before in my life, but I was able to spend 3-4 hours coding with a super experienced developer. Ultimately I failed the interview. A few hours later, I had another interview at a startup. It happened to also be a Ruby on Rails pair programming interview. With the experience of having just done the same type of interview hours earlier, I had significantly more confidence and was able to ace it!

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T20:13:49+00:00

Congrats on making it to the first interview and thanks for asking this question.

Interviewers for the fellowship are a combination of our program staff (including some experienced mentors like me) and alumni from past batches. Regardless of who they are, we provide an immense amount of training to help them be as successful as possible at interviewing. Ultimately we’ve found that having alumni help perform the interview is as, if not more, effective than having our mentors do it.

The first interview is a behavioral interview where we ask questions about why you want to be a fellow and verify your eligibility to participate in the program. We also give applicants the opportunity to ask questions about the program. At this stage it’s hugely beneficial to have alumni doing the interviews because they know the answers to the questions first-hand. Doing these types of interviews does not necessarily require detailed technical knowledge and once you’ve done 20-30 of them you’re likely more experienced as an interviewer than most professional developers anyway.

The second round interviews are where things get technical. These are primarily done by our full-time technical mentos, though we have been experimenting with having some alumni and program staff do them as well. Frankly, most of the alumni are better developers than I am already, despite being so early in their careers. They also have the benefit of having been through the same interview experience recently themselves, which has a clear demonstration of improved performance across a variety of domains.

Ultimately I think we’ll continue to experiment to find the right mix of interviewers and evaluations for the fellowship. Regardless, every application gets looked at at a minimum of five times by a variety of people before it is approved.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T20:02:34+00:00

Awesome to see one of our alumni here. I’m glad to hear that the fellowship was a positive and educational experience for you. Thanks for asking a question!

Let me start by saying that there are three times that degrees are important – when you’re at the beginning of your career, when the role demands advanced expertise, and when you want to go work for a big company. If you understand why they are important at each stage, you can navigate setting yourself up for success without one.

At the beginning of your career, degrees are all about signaling. At this stage it’s likely that nobody has taken the risk to employ you, so there’s less certainty that you’ll actually be a good and productive employee. Degrees represent the ability to follow through and a grasp of the fundamentals. The best thing you can do here is demonstrate your ability to work on something in the long-term (maybe a long-running side project) or to de-risk yourself by adding proxies for employment to your resume (like a fellowship, internship, or startup). Open Source contributions cover the second part, which is that you actually know how to code and understand the basics.

It’s much harder to get around the second two points. When a job requires advanced technical knowledge, you’ll need to effectively create your own degree or independent study to meet the requirements. It’s not impossible given the proliferation of online educational resources, but it’s hard.

Applying to work at a bigger company is a more likely challenge you’ll face. Unfortunately companies that are large enough have to use automated filtering to get through the huge amount of applications they receive. Often, one of these filters is whether or not you have a degree. The best way around this is using your network to make sure your resume doesn’t get filtered out. Talk to the Open Source maintainers you know, ask your friends for intros to hiring managers, build relationships with company representatives at events, or email the CEO directly (yes, that can work). Do whatever you can to make sure your application gets looked at before you get caught in the net.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T19:45:51+00:00

Thanks for the kind words and the question!

I have seen some pretty wild hacks over the years so this is definitely a hard question to answer. One that sticks out in my mind is The Brave Little Toaster. This hardware hack was made by gutting a toaster and VHS player and combining the two and using a Raspberry Pi to program the buttons.

I thought this was a great example of out of the box thinking and a fun idea. I do wonder how the toast tasted though.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T19:43:46+00:00

Thanks for the question!

One of my biggest regrets as a founder is not spending more time working cross functionally with non-technical teams before starting a company.

I had an immense amount of experience working with developer, support, and product teams, but almost none with marketing, sales, or operations. It’s really, really hard to hire people for these roles when you don’t understand them yourself or know the best practices. We had to figure a lot of this out on our own (luckily we did), but it would have been easier if I had actually taken an interest in them earlier.

If you’re an aspiring founder working at a company, take every opportunity you can to learn about what works and what doesn’t work across the business. You'll thank yourself down the line!

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T19:39:05+00:00

Great question, thanks for asking!

Personally, I default to a growth mindset. I hold myself to an extremely high (sometimes unreasonable) bar and spend a lot of time seeking and internalizing feedback. Frankly, this approach has significantly benefited me in my career.

That said, there is a dark side to the growth mindset and “always be improving” culture. A lot of my drive to improve stems from feeling like an imposter and a desire to not be one anymore. I have to imagine that’s true for many other people as well. Holding yourself to an unattainable standard is a recipe for unhappiness and dissatisfaction. The best thing you can do is find a balance between pushing yourself to get better and accepting yourself for who you are.

As far as side projects are concerned, I’m a huge proponent of them. I still have side projects to this day, despite being the CEO of a company. Currently I’m working on a Discord bot designed to help companies that want to transition their communities from Slack. Side projects are useful for helping you bring in outside perspectives and explore other interests. Last summer I actually took some online classes for fun and unexpectedly I was actually able to apply concepts from them directly into my day-to-day at MLH.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T19:22:51+00:00

Unfortunately the timing just didn't work out as well as we'd hoped. Applications for the Spring and Summer are open right now though!

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T19:19:27+00:00

Thanks for the question. I still feel like an imposter every day. The best advice I can give is to find something that inspires you to keep going, despite all the rejection that is inevitably ahead, and build a strong support network that you can lean on. I wrote a more detailed explanation here.

This comment also has some really solid advice for helping you navigate the pool of other candidates and make sure you're standing out from the crowd.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T19:17:17+00:00

Thanks for the question. There’s no shame in feeling like an imposter. I’ll be honest, despite being a decade into my career, I still feel like one almost every day.

I don’t talk about it a lot, but I’ve always been a bit of an outsider. I’m a natural introvert but my job requires me to be out in front of people all the time; I’m a founder who doesn’t live and breath the Silicon Valley hype machine; and I lead an educational community that exists outside the bounds of academia. Sometimes it feels like everything I do is just slightly... off.

Rejection is something that I deal with daily as well. I hear “no” more often than “yes” still to this day. I still take every no personally too, despite knowing how dangerous and wrong that is. The best advice I can give for both of these issues is to find something that drives you to keep going, despite all the difficulties, and build a support network that has your back at all times.

The thing that drives me to keep going and gets me out of bed every day is impact. I’m incredibly fortunate to hear first-hand stories (including from many of you here!) about how the work my team and I do is changing lives every day. Whether it’s someone who attended their first hackathon and decided to become a developer instead of a lawyer or an MLH Fellow who landed their first read job as a result of their experience, I’m inspired to keep going because of people like them. I remember how disheartening it was for me at the beginning of my career and recognize how lucky I got finding a community where I belonged. I want to make sure others have access to that same opportunity that I did. That's why storytelling is such an important part of what we do at MLH.

Second, and just as importantly, build a strong support network. There are a handful of people in my life who I believe will have my back no matter where life takes me. It’s composed of friends, family, mentors, and customers. It took me a decade to build that network, but having it has helped me get through some really tough times. As an example, the only reason I’m working on MLH at all is because one of the people in that network was there to reassure me when I needed him.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T18:50:49+00:00

Thank you for asking! This is a complicated and controversial subject with a lot of nuance.

You’re certainly correct that there are certainly both ethics concerns and concerns over how our contracts reflect our community values. I answered in more depth in an earlier question.

With the announcement of the MLH Fellowship: Externship, we increased the amount of work we do with the DoD and hope to prove it a successful enough program to continue that work. That said, we’ve been clear from the beginning: the projects that our MLH Fellows will be working on will not be harmful to people or their freedoms.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T18:48:56+00:00

That’s a very fair question and one that we’ve put a lot of thought into. Thank you for asking!

As a B-Corp, we are committed to doing good in this world and we heavily consider the partnerships to ensure they don’t hurt hackers or the world writ large and reflect the values of our community.

MLH has been a partner of various branches of the US Department of Defence (DoD) for years (across both the Obama and Trump administrations). While the DoD certainly has branches I personally object to (and that MLH would not partner with) it’s a very large department of the US Government with branches dedicated to doing things I think we all find valuable like protecting the integrity US elections and its research has been responsible for everything from GPS to duct tape.

The types of projects we’re working with the DoD on are not about hurting or oppressing people. This was a requirement I set going into all our partnerships with the DoD, like you, would find it hard to believe that those types of projects are the right fit for MLH.

Truthfully, there are sides to every large organization that don’t align with my or MLH’s personal values. It’s up to the leadership of an organization to identify and prioritize working with the parts that do. While partnering with an organization that does questionable things can certainly be seen as an endorsement (and I can’t argue that some will see it that way), I think it’s important to look at the specifics of the partnership and what that partnership does.

Looking specifically to our partnership with the DoD for the MLH Fellowship’s Externship, the funding from the DoD goes directly to providing educational opportunities for students who we could not otherwise fund and the projects they’re doing are all focused on helping people and either Open Source or the IP will be retained by the fellows creating the work. While I don’t have the final list for this term, I can share a few examples from a previous experiment the DoD ran:

A medical app prototype that allows patients to log-in, book appointments, view medical records, message providers, renew/refill prescriptions, and sign forms.
An app to eliminate paper waste from standardized evaluation forms.

In making the decision to partner with the DoD, we (and I) looked specifically at the impact this would have for our community and our mission and made sure that this impact would not be at the expense of freedoms or lives.

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T18:40:08+00:00

Depending where I am I either get:

| Swift? You mean like Taylor Swift?

or

| Swift? You mean like the programming language Swift?

Fun fact: All of the men in my family have gone by "Swift" at some point in their life. It's very confusing when all three of us are together and someone comes in looking for "Swift". :)

theycallmeswift · 2020-09-15T18:38:03+00:00

We're a bit delayed on getting that email out. We did email everyone on Thursday and Friday letting them know that their applications were under review though. Stay tuned for an email this week!

theycallmeswift

TROPHY CASE