 Hey everyone. Thanks for coming out. I really appreciate you all joining us for this session and thanks to the Linux Foundation for inviting me to come and speak to you today as well. We're all navigating uncharted waters today. COVID has thrown the future of work and education completely into flux. It exacerbated and accelerated what was basically a global skills shortage that was more than a decade in the making. And on top of that, the technical infrastructure that basically every company in the world depends on today is also starting to crumble under its own weight. If we want to reverse some of these trends that are existential in nature for a lot of us here, we need to start rethinking everything we thought we knew about where the next generation of open source developers actually come from and how we actually go about training them to be successful in the modern world. I'm here today to give you a little bit of a preview of what I think that future could look like. For those of you who don't know me yet, my name is Swift. I'm the CEO and a co-founder of Major League Hacking. I was an aspiring lawyer who actually turned software engineer after I went to my first hackathon. I think this might be the only conference where I can make that joke and have to worry there might be other lawyers in the room. But needless to say, since that event nearly a decade ago, I've been doing everything in my power I can to help empower our next generation of technologists, helping them learn the skills and build the network that they'll ultimately need to be successful in their careers. And the day after I got back from that hackathon, I changed my major computer science immediately because I thought that was the natural way to become software engineer as a complete outsider who had no idea. And what I quickly realized is that the things that you learn in a computer science classroom are not actually the things that you need to be employable as a software engineer in the first place. There's a lot of theory, a lot of things that are really great once you actually have the job. But having the ability to actually solve problems with code is not what they're teaching you in class. In fact, that was something that I was learning hackathons every single weekend when I was out of them. And it ends up I wasn't the only person who felt that way either. In fact, about 88% of all the aspiring technologists today say that they are not learning the skills in the classroom that they need to be ultimately successful entering the job market. And on the other side of that equation, when you talk to hiring managers, about 90% of them say that it's difficult to find and hire the right tech town with the skills that they actually need. And those numbers are actually pre-COVID. So it's only gotten worse since the pandemic actually set in. That disparity is what we call the tech skills gap. And it's the number one threat to business success on the mind of most executives today. And at the beginning of 2020, there were just about a million unfilled tech jobs in the US alone. Access to talent has been consistently rated as one of the greatest threats to businesses, even greater than access to capital for many startups. And between the great resignation, the accelerated digital transformation, and the eroded faith in our education system, COVID is basically just putting the squeeze on the job market here. Helping to actually close that skills gap is one of the reasons that I founded MLH, you're majorly hacking. For those of you who aren't familiar with MLH yet, we're a mission driven B Corp that's helping to empower our next generation of technologists, helping them gain the skills they actually need to be ultimately employable. A good way to think about this is if learning to code is getting from zero to one, MLH focuses on everything from one to a job or one to 100. We do that by creating hands-on experiential learning opportunities where developers can gain practical experience with the technologies that they'll actually ultimately use in their careers. And actually be able to demonstrate those abilities to employers as well. So hackathons, meetups, workshops, conferences, fellowship programs, anywhere an aspiring developer can actually get their hands dirty with code. We're usually there supporting them. And to date we've helped more than 8% of all the software engineers in the United States actually launch their careers. It counts for a little over half a million members today. They come from more than 70 countries and thousands of universities, bootcamps and different backgrounds. It's the largest community of early career technologists in the world. And not only that, but it's also one of the most diverse as well. Well, gender is only one metric to look at for that. In our community, more than 40% identify as non-male. And when you compare that to about 18% in a typical computer science classroom, it's pretty staggering what the difference is. Fun fact, some or possibly many of our alumni actually probably work at the companies that you work for too. When you go back tomorrow, I would encourage you to actually pull your engineering team. You may be surprised by the number of folks who graduated within the last eight years who actually come from the major hacking community. That's because we partner with the world's leading technology companies, actually helping them to build strong, diverse talent pipelines. We work together to identify hard and soft skills that they'll ultimately need to be successful in their careers. And then we create training pathways together for our community that empower them to actually learn and apply those skills. Along the way, we collect thousands of different data points that our customers can use to understand macro trends around what's going on in the industry, all the way down to micro things like an individual hiring decision. Between our community and our customers, there's actually another trend in addition to the skills gap that we've been seeing a lot recently. And I think it's actually imperative that every single person at this conference starts thinking about this on a regular basis. That trend is the looming open source infrastructure crisis. The demand for high quality open source software is rapidly outpacing our ability to deliver it sustainably. Many of the open source technologies that we all rely on are actually at risk of going un-maintained or even completely abandoned in some cases. With more than 90% of all software that's written today depending on open source, that really is an existential crisis for basically everybody. Using GitHub's public data sets, we can actually visualize this trend by looking at the growth of new unresolved issues year over year. So while it shouldn't be surprising to you that the overall number of created issues and closed issues, of course, have gone up exponentially given GitHub's growth over the last five years, the alarming statistic here is that the number of unresolved issues that remain year over year is actually also growing by nearly 40%. That backlog over the last five years accounts for about 19 million open unresolved issues on GitHub today. And that's just the public data set. So that doesn't even come into account for all of the private repositories that are available on GitHub as well. It's literally creating a perpetual backlog that is drowning maintainers and causing them to burn out. In fact, actually according to a recent maintainer survey, three in five maintainers have either quit or seriously considered quitting maintaining a project. It's something that I personally can relate to as well. It's due to feeling overwhelmed, underappreciated. As we all know here, open source is often a labor of love, even if you're working on open source for your employer sometimes. It's thankless work and it is literally just piling up faster than anybody can possibly deal with it. Now, it's not like maintainers aren't asking for help, though. When we talk to them, about 80% say that finding and recruiting new contributors and improving experience for new contributors are among their top three priorities. In fact, that's true for about 80 or 90% of all maintainers who talk to them. And in order to get out of that backlog and actually alleviate some of the pressure that's on these maintainers, we just need more hands on deck. But maintainers are the only people who are worried about the lack of new contributors coming online in the open source community. In fact, when you talk to employers, 92% of them say that finding talent with open source skills is extremely difficult. Meanwhile, about half of those businesses say that they're planning to accelerate their hiring for these hard-to-find critical skills next year. And given that tech unemployment is hovering about 1.5% right now, our only hope in closing the gap and not just fighting each other to the death is actually focusing on where the next generation of talent is going to come from, where that next generation of great open source citizens are. And it's not like developers don't believe that open source is important for their career. When we poll our community, about 93% of them say that they believe open source will be critical for their future career development. So where are all these people at, right? Well, it ends up that more than half of all the new developers coming online each year have not actually been able to contribute to open source yet. There's a massive opportunity cost there for all of us, for all those maintainers, for all the businesses that depend on their software as well. And it gets even more frustrating when you actually talk to people about why this is happening. We ask them, what's preventing you from contributing in the first place? Because it's something that's completely addressable. For about a third of them, it's actually just not knowing where to start. I think about the process of contributing to open source and the sheer number of repositories and issues, it can feel overwhelming, especially for a beginner who's an outsider and not already a part of our community here. And another 31% say that it's a lack of confidence in their own skills. And as we all know, there's so much out there in the land of open source that basically anybody of any skill level can find a way to contribute if we guide them appropriately. So let's take a step back and recap where we are. The demand for qualified tech talent is rapidly outpacing our ability to supply it. Our open source infrastructure is literally crumbling under its own weight, causing all of the maintainers who built that software to burn out. And our classrooms are not educating the next generation of developers with the practical skills they need to either launch their careers or contribute to open source. This literally adds up again to that existential crisis that we need to resolve. So what can we actually do about this? And last summer, we at Major League Hacking identified an opportunity with some of our partners that starts to get to the heart of some of these issues. I'm going to give you a quick case study on what we've been up to and then I'm going to give you some key learnings that I think you can all take away when you're thinking about future programs that are similar. So I'd like you to meet the MLH Fellowship. We match developers from our community with Real World Open Source Projects. They're coming from partners like GitHub, Facebook, and Amazon. And over the course of this 12-week fellowship, they collaborate with other aspiring software engineers to actually contribute to those projects. They have access to an amazing group of technical mentors. They go to speaker series, participate in hackathons. And there's a fully integrated skill-based curriculum that they navigate as they're learning how to be great open source citizens. At the end of it all, they walk away with this amazing portfolio piece that is literally a public demonstration of their ability to write production-level code and a pathway to potential employment with the sponsor that paid for them to actually be there in that fellowship. And from our partner's perspective, this is basically a dream come true. They're investing in both the technology and the talent pipeline that their business depends on. And it's not a drain on internal resources for these already stretched teams and maintainers. MLH takes care of everything from sourcing through screening, matching, management, and ultimately evaluation of these fellows who are going through it. Your team, instead of focusing on all the administrative work of running a program like this, can actually just focus on building relationships, making progress on your actual roadmap, and then finding the right talent to ultimately support your goals. And the results have been absolutely incredible so far. In the last 12 months, we had more than 30,000 developers apply for this program with basically zero marketing behind it at all. And this isn't just somebody filling in an email address and saying, hey, I'm interested. This is closer to what I would consider a college admissions process where somebody is filling out an application that takes between 45 minutes and an hour to complete between essays, code samples, references, and then ultimately going through a series of interviews that range from behavioral to technical to be admitted. And we're also able to tap into those thousands of data insights that we're pulling from members of our community as they progress from day zero through day 100 to help us identify talent that's on the cusp, but just needs a little bit of extra help to get them over the edge where they're ready to actually go and launch their career. I'm proud to say that over that same period, we enrolled and graduated more than 450 fellows around the world. They range from current university students to boot camp grads, career changers, and even some existing engineers who are just looking for something new. They learned software engineering and open source best practices by navigating that curriculum and ultimately contributing to those projects. They attended daily stand-ups, retrospectives, show and tells, and got to work individually with mentors from the sponsoring companies to actually see what it was like to work there. With more than 70% of fellows coming from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds in tech, it's also one of the most diverse pipelines that you could potentially pull from as well. And to be clear, these fellows aren't just working on fun projects that don't ever really see the light of day. They're making contributions to real open source technologies that all of us are using and depending on projects like React, Jest, Homebrew, Flask, and so many more. Collectively, fellows have submitted more than 1,300 pull requests in the last 12 months to those projects. And with an 80 to 90% merge rate, they're actually meaningfully helping to push the roadmap forward. There's a number of probably major features, if you're a user, some of these that our fellows are actually responsible for launching in the last 12 months that you may not even have known you've been benefiting from. But you don't have to take my word for how amazing an experience this is. We can actually hear some of the stories of the people who've been through this. So I want to introduce you to Sad. He's a student studying at Vanderbilt University. He joined our community in 2019 when he was lucky enough to attend the local MLH hackathon that was happening on campus. He was very beginning of his career and he was inspired about how welcoming and collaborative the entire experience was. It was really like nothing that he'd ever seen. He felt like he had found a place where he belonged, which is a feeling that I had when I attended my first event as well. Around that same time, he applied for an internship at Facebook and was immediately rejected. And he realized that he wasn't gaining the kind of practical production level experience that he would need to actually be able to go out and land that job at Facebook, not in the classroom anyway. And if he wanted that internship, he knew that he was going to actually have to make some changes. After talking to some friends, he decided that the best path forward was actually to start contributing to open source. It felt like the best of all worlds here. But his experience getting started in the open source community was nothing like it was joining the major like hacking community in the first place. He ultimately found open source to be unwelcoming and difficult to get started with. Everybody he would talk to that was a maintainer would ask him to work on docs because they literally didn't know what else to do with them. And frankly, that wasn't the type of coding experience that he was looking for from open source. Luckily though, he heard about a new program that we launched at MLH called the MLH Fellowship. And the idea of being able to spend 12 weeks actually learning about open source under the guidance of mentors with real curriculum that's walking through it was like a dream come true. So Seat applied and ultimately was accepted into our spring batch where he was an MLH fellow. Now during that fellowship, he learned a ton and had an amazing experience. He got matched to a project called PISA, which is a new open source project from our partners over at Facebook where he built out a VS code extension that's actually out in public today. It was both his first major open source contribution as well as his first production quality code that he had written. And I'm also proud to say that he did land that internship at Facebook where he spent this past summer and he said that looking back on his experience going through the MLH fellowship it was exactly what he needed to get him over the edge. He walked away with an amazing new portfolio piece that was directly relevant to the work he ultimately did at Facebook and he had an ability to show off his skills and a network to support him on that journey. Now, Seat's story is just one of many and actually we can hear from some of our alumni through a short video that I've got here for you today. The MLH Fellowship exists to help the next generation of software engineers start their careers. They'll work on a variety of projects which give them the ability and confidence to go and land a job. It's been three months. I didn't even realize how fast it passed. The fellowship is basically a bunch of people that are super into tech and super into building cool stuff and learning most of all and everybody in the program showed that we all went from open source consumers to open source contributors. But what I took away from the program was so much more than just having to contribute. What I took away was this amazing sense of community. I'm coming out of the fellowship, the Explorer Fellowship with three amazing open source colleges that can be real products in a real world today. For what is fellowship? My only last three months. I know its impact will last a lifetime. MLH gives me this sense of one big family which is it's really a reason to smile every day, right? I have to say it was the most incredible experience and the MLH Fellowship gave me the the opportunity that I don't think I would have otherwise. I actually do feel more like a software developer today than I felt before. Because it has given me this motivation and a huge portfolio that I can now present in front of potential employers. So as you can see, fellows had this experience that frankly I would have loved to go through as well. It's been truly transformational for many of them but they weren't the only people with with really amazing things to say as well. Here's a quote from one of the core maintainers of the Powits Project which it includes tools like Flask and Click and Gingya. Things that millions and millions of Python developers depend on every single day. Having those MLH fellows ultimately enabled him and his team to be more productive and ship the software that so many of us were depending on. In addition to making maintainers lives better and easier, it's also made employees at many of our partner companies feel way more engaged which I know is a major focus of many open source program offices. Here's a quote from one of our mentors at Facebook from a recent program that we ran together. From her perspective, participating in this program was an ideal launchpad for people who were entering Facebook as entry-level employees and frankly I share her sentiment. I think the opportunity to be able to spend time actually learning the skills and tools that I would need to be able to launch my career in a structured environment would have been a dream come true. Having an open source contribution and being able to work with mentors of the company I might have wanted to work for was icing on the cake you know. So looking at the results it's clear I think that we're onto something really interesting here. We've been able to build an extremely diverse talent pipeline that's trained in open source best practices with a proven track record of being able to write and ship production code and the confidence that these fellows ultimately need to be able to get started in their careers. And meanwhile our customers have been able to demonstrate a clear and meaningful ROI across engineering HR open source program offices and DevRel. They made real progress on the road maps, strengthened the most critical tech infrastructure that they're depending on, built meaningful relationships with talent that's ultimately going to fuel their business and improve the happiness and satisfaction of their existing employees and maintainers. Plus this whole thing is also faster, more cost effective and produces more accurate results than what a traditional internship program might actually produce in the first place. So what's not to love right? Well let's take a few steps back and ask ourselves what we can actually take away from this experience and how you can actually start using some of the things that we learned in the programs that you start launching to support open source at your organizations. I've got three big takeaways for you today which coincidentally are the things that we've actually been talking about in the DevRel community for about a decade now. So I think there's probably a lot that we can all learn from each other if we started spending more time together. The first one is that you know traditional silos between teams and companies no longer work in the post-COVID world. You know rapid digitalization has dramatically increased the interconnectivity between individuals, teams and goals in every organization. You need to form cross-functional coalitions that align around each team's goals if you want to be successful in these types of programs. And you know while our partners had a single champion usually from you know an engineering and open source program office, HR or DevRel, our most successful customers have actually been bringing in their counterparts from these other organizations and finding way to you know help them ultimately achieve their goals in exchange for budget, projects or additional resources to support the initiatives. And these internal partnerships are ultimately stickier, more visible and ultimately more resilient with better results you know across the board. The second takeaway is that these types of programs need to be demonstrating ROI literally at day zero. And everybody who works in DevRel or an OSPO knows that there's a massive misunderstanding about what we do you know even internally at our own companies. Often we find ourselves having to continuously justify our value and what we're actually bringing to the table. And that can result in things like budget cuts or constantly shifting priorities or ultimately demoralization and burnout across those organizations. The ability to demonstrate a clear measurable ROI from the very beginning that ties into core business metrics like recruiting or the engineering roadmap will ultimately make your programs more resilient to those types of changes as they progress. Also making sure that you have digestible content that you can share out across the organization regularly will make sure that you're always top of mind for executives and your colleagues too. And finally my last takeaway is that you need to be thinking long term you know existential problems that we face in business and frankly in society are rarely resolved by short-term solutions. We need to make investments that pay off in three, five, ten years you know remembering that there's a one and a half percent unemployment rate in tech fighting over existing talent is literally the definition of a zero sum game. If we want to solve this problem we need to ultimately be thinking about a solution that lasts well into the future. And similarly you know investing in programs that drive up contributions from new contributors without actually training them on how to continuously and successfully integrate into open source and do it in the long term is literally just adding to the same burden that maintainers are already drowning under and burning out on. We need to be designing programs the same way startups do looking for opportunities for exponential scale and return on investment. So there you have it building cross-functional coalitions that align around our teams different goals and ultimately contribute success to all of them finding ways to demonstrate clear measurable ROI from day zero and tell that story regularly to the entire company and being able to think long term when we're designing these programs looking for those exponential growth and ROI opportunities down the road. Of course MOH and I would love to advise support or help in any way we can to help get programs like these off the ground. If you're interested in learning more about MOH or the fellowship program in particular you can do that at our website it's fellowship.moh.io slash partners. We're already running three batches of this per year and this is a perfect time to be starting to think about your 2022 strategy. I'd love to help contribute to that anyway I can. Additionally if you're struggling with any of the challenges we talked about today whether it's an open source program office, dev rel or just program design helping to empower our next generation I'd love to talk to you about it. My contact information is on this slide. Feel free to grab me after the session if you want or drop me a line for your email or twitter but thank you once again to the Linux Foundation for inviting me out to speak and thank you to all of you for coming out to listen to me. Once again I'm Swift, I'm a CEO and co-founder of Major League Hacking. Thanks and happy hacking everybody.