MLH Fellowship: Mentoring the Next Generation of Open Source Maintainers

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MLH Fellowship: Mentoring the Next Generation of Open Source Maintainers

Behind every successful open-source project are the dedicated maintainers who ensure its stability, accessibility, and continued growth. Opportunities like the MLH Fellowship allow new developers to work alongside maintainers who showcase the best in open-source development. These maintainers guide contributors, review code, and foster collaboration on thousands of projects each year. To celebrate their hard work, GitHub Education is shining a spotlight on three outstanding projects across the MLH Fellowship, and the maintainers who make them possible.

From First Contribution to Continued Impact

Maintainer Highlight: Mehdi Nassim Khodja (Consul.NET) former fellow and 7-time MLH Fellowship Partner.

In 2022, Mehdi Nassim Khojda joined the MLH Fellowship as a contributor to ILGPU, an open-source JIT compiler for a high-performance .NET GPU program. After a successful MLH fellowship where Mehdi tackled projects from redesigning and rebuilding the ILGPU website using the Jekyll static site generator to implementing continuous integration workflows to automate site deployment on GitHub Pages, Mehdi was hired to work with the Fellowship partner that mentored him during the program. Now, Mehdi has passed this mentorship on — he has participated in the MLH Fellowship in 7 straight cohorts as a mentor to Fellows on Consul.NET, a .NET client library for the Consul HTTP API, the project he maintains.

His commitment to fostering new contributors is reflected in Fellows like Tamnjong Larry Tabeh, whose technical skills led to 14 merged pull requests, meaningfully adding to the Consul.NET project. This ongoing cycle of mentorship and contribution is what strengthens open-source communities, creating lasting impact across projects and people.

Creating Long Term Champions of Open Source Security

Maintainer Highlight: Mentors Tabatha DiDomenico and Caterina Rindi, and mentee Nima Fallah [G-Research Open Source Software (GR-OSS)], multi-cohort partners.

For the past year, Fellow Nima Fallah has worked with Mentor Tabatha DiDomencio on the DevRel team of G-Research Open Source Software (GR-OSS). Under Tabatha’s guidance, Nima developed a formalized methodology and reporting structure for consistent evaluation of the security posture across GR-OSS projects. Over two Fellowship cohorts Nima audited 21 repos and opened 188 issues for remediating security concerns, reviewed GitHub actions workflows, and added new automation metrics to assess project performance. Through this experience, Nima not only deepened his technical expertise but also gained valuable insight into relationship-building in open-source communities and the role of DevRel teams in making open-source software safer and more accessible.

Reflecting on Nima’s contributions, Tabatha emphasized how Nima’s work directly impacted repo security health. Nima and Tabatha’s continued involvement exemplifies how mentorship programs help young developers transition from contributors to long term champions of open source security and advocacy.

Maintainers Safeguarding AI-Generated Content

Maintainer Highlight: Ayush Bhardwaj and the team at the Meta FAIR research group including mentors and maintainers Hady Elsahar, Pierre Fernandez, Tuan Tran, Sylvestre Rebuffi, Valeriu Lacatusu, and Tomáš Souček.

Working alongside experts at the Meta FAIR research group, MLH Fellow Ayush Bhardwaj developed and trained a new model of the AudioSeal watermarking tool for AI speech and audio. This tool embeds an imperceptible watermark into audio, and includes a detector that robustly identifies the watermark. Ayush’s contributions were key to the work done at FAIR and gave him a front-row seat to the collaboration and joy of open source software development. His work, documented in this blog post, showcases the importance of open source development and the essential work performed by maintainers. Building from these efforts, the FAIR team released VideoSeal in December 2024.

About the MLH Fellowship

The MLH Fellowship is where aspiring technologists become open source contributors and launch their careers. This immersive 12-week program directly embeds Fellows into open source projects where they become vital community members, tackling bugs and implementing new features. Under the guidance of peers and engineers from top tech companies, Fellows develop in-demand skills through contributions to real open source projects. With over 1,000 alumni, the MLH Fellowship has been a powerful onramp for early-career developers to make their mark in open source.

“Because of this program, I now know how open source development works and how I can start contributing even after I graduate from the program.”
Anreet Kaur on her Fellowship Experience (Contributor to Apache Arrow)

“Thanks to the Fellowship, I got my feet wet with Open Source, got a few awesome contributions merged for a project used by many people, and really built my confidence for being an independent contributor in the future.”
Juan Escalada on his Fellowship Experience (Contributor to ParquetSharp)

You can apply for the MLH Fellowship here and sign up for your next hackathon in the 2025 MLH hackathon season! The MLH Fellowship is always looking for passionate maintainers to mentor the future of open source. Learn more about partnering with us here.