Jon Gottfried

01. About

I'm Jon — a builder from New York. Since 2013 I've been a co-founder and board member of Major League Hacking, the official student hackathon league, which I started with Mike Swift and which now calls itself the world's largest developer community. By MLH's own count, about 15% of software engineers worldwide got their start through MLH.

Before MLH I was a developer evangelist — first at Twilio (2012–2014), then at The Echo Nest, the music-intelligence company acquired by Spotify in 2014. Along the way I was National Director of StartupBus and co-created Hacker Union. The through-line has always been the same: teach people to build, then get out of their way.

Forbes put me on the 30 Under 30 for Education in 2017; Stony Brook University, where I graduated in 2011, put me on its 40 Under 40. Most days you can find what I'm actually making on GitHub.

02. Experience

1. 2013 — Present

   Co-Founder & Board Member · Major League Hacking

   Co-founded the official student hackathon league with Mike Swift; today it runs the MLH Fellowship and describes itself as the world's largest developer community.

   • community
   • hackathons
   • developer education
2. 2012 — 2014

   Developer Evangelist · Twilio

   Taught developers to build with communications APIs — talks, hack nights, and Node.js and Sinatra tutorials people still stumble onto today.

   • Node.js
   • Sinatra
   • APIs
   • devrel
3. 2014

   Developer Evangelist · The Echo Nest → Spotify

   Evangelized music-intelligence APIs at The Echo Nest, the company Spotify acquired in 2014.

   • music data
   • APIs
   • devrel
4. Earlier

   National Director · StartupBus

   Directed the national edition of the build-a-startup-on-a-moving-bus competition — equal parts hackathon, road trip, and stress test.

   • startups
   • events
   • mentorship
5. Earlier

   Co-creator · Hacker Union

   Co-created a grassroots collective for working hackers to meet, build, and ship together.

   • community
   • grassroots

03. Projects

• MLH Fellowship

  The current focus — in his own GitHub bio's words, "preparing the MLH Fellowship": MLH's program for early-career engineers, grown out of a decade of student hackathons.

  • education
  • open source
  • early-career

• mlh-hackathon-organizer-guide 351

  An open playbook for anyone running their first hackathon — the institutional knowledge of hundreds of student events, written down and given away.

  • guide
  • community
  • open source

• omniauth-mlh & passport-mlh-oauth2

  "Sign in with MLH" for the two ecosystems hackers actually use — an OmniAuth strategy for Ruby and a Passport strategy for Node.js.

  • Ruby
  • Node.js
  • OAuth

The archive runs deeper — Twilio home automation, social sharing for Google Glass, and other artifacts of the evangelist years live on as past work. See the full project archive →  ·  on GitHub →

04. Writing & Speaking

• Writing

  Essays on Medium

  Writing on hackathons, developer communities, and the craft of teaching people to build — at medium.com/@jonmarkgo.

• Talk

  All Things Open — 2021

  On stage at one of the largest open-source conferences in the U.S.

• Classic

  “So Long And Thanks For All The Shirts”

  The 2014 farewell-to-Twilio post — the last thing the old site ever published, and the reason this page exists.

• Interviews

  Conversations on hackathon culture

  Interviews on how MLH grew, and why community — not code — is the hard part.

The full set — every Twilio tutorial, talk, and press mention — lives on the writing page. Writing, talks & press →