SUSE GUEST BLOG AUTHORED BY:

Adrian Goins, Director, Developer Advocacy, Redpanda Data

Redpanda Data, a SUSE partner, started the Hack the Planet Scholarship in 2021 with the goal of making the tech world better and more accessible to everyone. This year we’ve been joined by DoorDash, who is sponsoring two additional recipients! 

The scholarship promotes diversity by providing financial support and mentorship to underrepresented groups and minorities, helping them hack on a distributed systems-related project over a four-month period. Diversity leads to greater innovation, and the tech world thrives on innovation.

“[The Hack the Planet Scholarship] helped me to advance my goal of building an AI startup by enabling me to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to design and implement complex systems as well as to evaluate existing tools and use them effectively.” – Anush, First scholarship recipient

Scholarship recipients will receive $1,500 per month and weekly one-on-one mentorship from Redpanda’s senior engineers, who have experience working on some of the largest and most complex distributed systems in existence. This mentorship covers everything from reviewing design and code to providing the support needed for participants to successfully complete their projects. There is no requirement for projects to be open source, but we encourage the recipients to give back to the community by sharing their project and helping others use it successfully.

Scholarship requirements and how to apply

We are asking that all applicants have basic programming skills and have basic proficiency in one or more of Kotlin, C, C++, Go, Java, or JavaScript.

To apply, fill out the application form, which includes writing a project proposal that you want to hack on over four months. The deadline to apply is June 30th 11:59 p.m. PST.

Successful applications will include the following: 

• Tell us your story (include your Github profile) and why you think this opportunity would help you build something cool and innovative. Be specific about how you would use the scholarship to create your project.
• Explain how Redpanda can help you, with mentorship or other resources. How can we accelerate your progress? How will working closely with our engineers help you?
• Provide a summary of the project you want to hack on. What is the problem or opportunity you see that this project addresses? What is your motivation in building this solution?
  • Make sure the project involves some sort of distributed system: two or more computers trying to accomplish a task (saving data, replicating files, etc.). The project should be challenging and capable of being broken down and scoped out into three to four months of work. 

For more information, please refer to the official Hack the Planet page on the Redpanda website. 

Adrian Goins is the Director of Developer Advocacy at Redpanda Data. He started his career building physical infrastructure for an ISP and grew up to build data centers for large media companies. Later he dove headlong into the virtual world, surrounding himself with clouds, containers and Kubernetes. Now he helps developers build applications that leverage streaming data instead of batch processing. He enjoys storytelling and building communities, and he really loves teaching people the things that they want to learn.