Nikhil Vytla

As soon as Nikhil Vytla begins recounting his connection to computer science, his passion is evident. Some hackers blossom later in their academic careers, but not Nikhil: he was still just a child when he first fell for technology. While in elementary school, he was a fan of robotics (he says, “perhaps from watching Transformers too much!”) and space exploration. Ever since, he has been blazing his path through the hacking world, building upon his early curiosity to follow his technological dreams.

At his first hackathon as a high school junior, VikeHacks 2017, he saw the potential of combining his sense of humor with his newfound interest in game development. He and his friends successfully created a game, but the real success was in their hilarious presentation. They had the audience laughing endlessly as they compared their glitches to high school struggles, and that moment, he says, changed his path. “Something that had been a mere thought a day earlier was now a tangible experience that brought joy, however temporary, to people's lives. […] I continue to strive to build experiences that engage my peers, and experiences that bring joy to the communities around me.”

Since VikeHacks, Nikhil has been a part of the hacker community in various ways. He has been a competitor in many events, an organizer on four occasions, and a three-time MLH Fellow.

As a participant in HackDuke 2019, he built FloodGate, a responsive natural disaster early warning and detection app to alert communities to rising floodwaters in real-time using remote sensor-based and crowd-sourced data. Since FloodGate, he has created many complex hacks applying technology he learned through hackathons, including Flask, the Twilio API, ngrok, Arduino, Cloud Firestore, and SQLite3.

As an organizer of hackathons like HackNC, HackDSC, and more, he understands the depth and interconnectedness of the hacker community. The support, camaraderie, and enthusiasm that organizers exude keep bringing him back. He sums it up, saying, “it’s the ability to collaborate effectively and work efficiently together as a team that helps enable hackathons, both large and small, to be such incredibly high-energy, dynamic events.”

His experience as an MLH Fellow has been especially gratifying. As a Production Engineering Fellow with Facebook/Meta in the summer of 2021 he learned strong DevOps skills, supported once again by a strong community, “many of us didn't know how to use Docker, or Nginx, or how to write Bash commands that didn't crash. But through all of our trials and tribulations, through our frustrations with docker-compose and port forwarding and debugging service failures, we grouped together and continued to support each other.” Through his next MLH Fellowship, as a GitHub extern, he was able to learn about sustainable engineering practices within GitHub Enterprise and even share his knowledge of accessibility in team presentations and 1:1s with senior managers at GitHub.

His involvement as an MLH Fellow also illuminates his overarching purpose in coding: healthcare and accessibility. Nikhil has an extensive background in developing code and software to benefit those with chronic health conditions such as Alzheimer’s and lingering ankle instability. His focus on accessibility is razor-sharp. When he creates, he does so with accessibility and equity at the forefront of his mind, and it shows. He has pushed for equal access for underrepresented populations throughout his career, including during his time at Meta, Impact Labs, and Amazon Web Services. At AWS, he authored 8-page accessibility reports and playbooks with actionable insights to improve EC2 web console experiences for developers with disabilities, showcasing his dedication to what he believes.

Perhaps that is what stands out most from Nikhil’s lengthy list of achievements. He has a dynamic and prolific resume full of remarkable accomplishments—including time as an ML infrastructure engineer at TruEra, President at CS + Social Good, and his many internships and Fellowships. Even more impressive is his desire to give back to the MLH community and his family, and to speak for those whose voices are not heard.