MLH: Bitter sweet ends

So, you know they say part of the journey is the end right? So, this year in October 2020, I started a small journey, alongside a journey to better discover myself. A journey with Major League Hacking and 12 strangers turned friends that started on 5th October at 10 AM in the morning.

I’m not going to lie, when I got selected into MLH Fellowship it felt so unreal that for a moment I even thought is this even real? (AM I GETTING SCAMMED?) But no, it was all real. Every moment that the Saurabh from 5th October was gonna experience till this day was pretty darn real.

I’m writing this today, because this is a major milestone for me, and I want a moment to look back and appreciate what I and my new friends achieved during the last 10 weeks. Yesterday, me and my friends graduated from MLH Fellowship, and it was a moment of nostalgia, joy, sadness, pride and 99 other things I can’t put into words. Today, I’m not going to try to edit my blog to the best of my abilities or add gifs or make memes for blogs(okay, I did that, but after writing the blog), today it’s just me talking and expressing my deepest gratitude to MLH, to all of the awesome people I have met during the last 10 weeks, and to life.

During the last 10 weeks, I got to meet some of the most talented people I have ever met, befriend them and had an opportunity to work with them, learn with and from them and bring our ideas to life. In the last 10 weeks, I went all the way in to get out of my comfort zone, trying to communicate better with everyone, trying to learn more, and write better code. And man, It was one hell of a journey.

Right from the first week, I started off with something new. In our first sprint, me and my teammates Dipanwita and Mondale built a full stack application and I for the first time with Dipanwita built a flask backend for our application and overnight learnt and implemented a crude login and sign up system using Flask and JWT. For my second sprint, I built a game with my friends Shilpita and Vividha using Unity & C# with no prior knowledge whatsoever and the list goes on till Sprint 5 (no I’m not gonna list all of them, because I simply can’t condense the hard work that we have put in each sprint into two lines).

Each Sprint I saw some really good projects by my Podmates, learnt something new and fostered friendships along the way. We had game nights (game mornings for people in India) where we used to play Among Us, Skribbl, Code Names, made memes and so on. On each Monday and Wednesday, we used join our zoom meeting at 10 AM, and the share progress that we have made, giving shoutouts to each other. We used to have Show and Tells where someone would pick a topic and present on it, Team Building exercises, Developer round tables, which by the way, got me more active on twitter (another social media, just great).

And no, it wasn’t all perfect, we all didn’t join meetings everyday or turned on cameras every time due to our own personal reasons(sometimes we were just too sleepy, and joined the meetings as soon as we woke up XD). We all didn’t become chatty from day one. We all weren’t always hyped about presenting on Show & Tells. I remember, during our second sprint our Pod Leader Kunal asked us who wanna present for next Show & Tell, and none of us replied, and then Chau volunteered and I remember saying, “thank you for taking one for the team” and we all laughed and guess who got selected to present after Chau 😂

The point is nothing is perfect, but it’s just that sometimes positives outweighs the negatives, and in this case by a very large margin. I didn’t get a chance to work with everyone, and that’s a regret I’ll always have, but that still doesn’t mean I didn’t gain them as my friends. We have told each other we’ll still stay connected and help each other out whenever possible. By the end of Fellowship, we all had the same zoom background and yes I’m flexing now because why not? I had the best Podmates!!

I know, I haven’t even touched all of it, like Capture the Flag, the cross pod meeting, the events organized by MLH, Will’s ASMR(I mean, not mentioning that is a crime in itself) but I guess this is enough for now. So, hey Hack Sparrows🐤 aka Pod 1.1.2, I guess I’ll just end this post as a Sparrow with one last standup note:

Yesterday:
– finally graduated as MLH Batch 1 Fellow
Today:
– Worked on the Pod’s website
– Attended classes
– Writing a blog to appreciate what we have achieved
Blocker:
– No more stand ups 😦
Shoutouts:
– Ahad, Ajwad, Chau, Dipanwita, Emily, Julia, Kunal, Mondale, Rajat, Shilpita, Vividha, Vrushti and of course Me! (tons of love for all of you💕🐤, me included, I love myself XD)

Take care everyone & Stay safe💕