MLH × DEV — Developer Growth Partnerships

Put Your Product
in the Hands of
5 Million Developers

MLH reaches developers at every stage, from students at their first hackathon to the professionals who choose their company's stack.

Meet Some of Our Partners

Google Cloud Meta GitHub Snowflake Microsoft MongoDB ElevenLabs Solana Tiger Data SpaceXAI
~1 in 3US CS grads join MLH programs
5M+Developers across 100+ countries
75%Of DEV members have 5+ years of experience
~50%Of the world's devs interact with MLH annually
The Problem We Solve

Even the largest marketing team can't be everywhere at once.

MLH runs the places where developers already spend their time, in person at over a thousand events a year and DEV's online community of millions. When you partner with us, your product is there without your team having to staff a booth or coordinate entire programs on their own. Whether the goal is getting known or getting adopted, we can help you put your product where developers are.

How It Works

One partner from first build
to production.

MLH and DEV take your product from first discovery to lasting adoption through three pillars that feed each other.

01 / INTELLIGENCE

Your program starts with a baseline.

We benchmark your brand across the community and use the data to shape the programs that follow. Each one gets measured against that baseline.

  • Awareness & sentiment benchmarks vs. your competitors
  • How developers describe your product
  • The exact step where your onboarding loses developers
02 / MOBILIZATION

Your product gets always on distribution.

We bring your technology to events year round, and match each product to the audience most likely to adopt it.

  • Hundreds of in person hackathons a year
  • Campus hack days & conference events
  • Monthly online learning festivals in 100+ countries
  • MLH staff run it all, you don't need anyone on site
03 / BRAND LEADERSHIP

Your brand stays visible to both developers and agents.

DEV keeps your brand in front of developers between events, and the content keeps working for you in search and AI answers.

  • Reach 4M+ developers on one of the world's largest developer communities
  • Takeovers, newsletters & livestreams between events
  • Content the LLMs cite when developers ask for tool picks

Developers build with your product at our events → publish what they made on DEV → search engines and LLMs point the next developer to it. Your reach keeps growing across the whole partnership.

Why it works Developers try new tools where they have room to experiment. For more than a decade, MLH has built the third spaces where that happens, and developers trust them for learning and building together. Products discovered in those spaces follow developers into production, whether the builder is a student or a senior engineer choosing the team's stack.
Program Inventory

Where your product shows up.

MLH staff run each program end to end and handle everything from promotion to judging.

In Person

League Hackathons

Builders at student hackathons worldwide meet your product season after season, with a prize category that rewards using it.

300+ events per season
In Person

Conference Hackathons

Reach professional developers at the exact moment they're most open to adopting new tools.

20+ tech conferences
Online

Global Hack Weeks

Monthly online festivals where thousands of developers sign up for your product through workshops and challenges.

12 festivals a year
Online

DEV Challenges

Online hackathons where each submission is a published DEV post, with durable, searchable proof of building with your product.

4M+ DEV members
Media

DEV Takeovers & Newsletters

Homepage takeovers, email digest placements, and newsletter sponsorships reaching developers in different formats.

1.5M+ email subscribers
Global

Flagship Events

Put your brand on the seasonal moments developers show up for, like Hacktoberfest, a month of building open source and AI projects.

Every October, worldwide
Partner Results

Partnerships that moved the numbers.

A hackathon participant spends 6+ hours building with a sponsor's technology in a single event, longer than any ad or booth conversation gets you. You see that time again later, as preference in surveys and as production usage on the teams they join.

+65%

lift in unaided brand preference over a five year partnership with a global cloud platform

62,000

signups and 24,000 projects generated across 850+ hackathons in that same partnership

7.2×

more likely to adopt a partner's platform than the broader developer community

51%

of alumni have introduced a technology they learned at MLH into production at their employer

Results from real MLH partner programs.

Ready to become the tool developers reach for first?

Tell us where you are, and our partnerships team will reach out to start scoping a program around your products and goals.

✓ Opening your email client. Send the drafted message and we'll take it from there.