Techtonic is A Mozilla Web extensions Hands-on Workshop & Hackathon scheduled on 7 th and 8 th October 2017 at SRM University Kattakulathur Campus. The workshop will be taken by the Mozilla Reps Viswaprasath, Karthickeyan and Dinesh of the Mozilla Tamilnadu Community and is Organised by SRMKZILLA The Mozilla Campus Club Of SRM University KTR.

The aim of this session is to help attendees to get started with WebExtensions. On the first day, the attendees will learn about WebExtensions, and introduction about basic API. Then they will be sharing about the extension they would like to develop next day. Second day is full of coding and 1-hour demo by all the attendees.

This is the first time I am Fully mentoring the participants. Earlier I mentored the Participants in SFD17 Hack. But in SFD I was also one of the participants. There I mentored a small scale participants. Here its totally a different Scenario. The Participants ranges from 45-50. So More Responsibility 🙂.

Day 1:

The First day the Session Agenda was

  • Getting Started with Mozilla Community
  • Technical Introduction about Web Extension.
  • Introduction of various Web Extension APIs.
  • Discussion & Design prototype on Extension to be developed.

Karthickeyan Explained about the Contribution Path to Mozilla why we should move to the Mozilla Web Extensions.

Then the Web Extension APIs like Context Menu Demo Were give by the Viswaprasath and Dinesh. Also the addon Demo Controlling Youtube by the Web Extension was also given. Through this Participants were able to get their First Web Extension running on their coolest browser now Yeah It’s Firefox Nightly. If you haven’t installed this yet You can get it here.

The Participants were So happy and coudn’t control their Joy. So they Started tweeting about it. We followed this HashTag #SRMKZillaExt for this Event. And The participants started thinking about the idea they want to develop next day.

Day 2:

This Day we started around 9:30 AM. The Paricipants are started filling up their ideas in etherpad. Based on that All of us started guiding the participants about the API they can use for their Extensions.

I mentored around 10 participants. I helped them debug their issues. One of the participants I mentored has an idea like Based on the options we select in Context menu it Search and filter out images with the different type of extensions like .png , .jpg. He is very active and he keep on asking questions. I also learned a lot of things by Debugging their Issues and I explored some new APIs.

  Me while Debugging Issues  

After that totally 10 participants finished their Extensions in the given time. As I am already having a previous exprerience in Github and publishing the Web Extension, Viswaprasath told me to help the participants to publish their Extension into AMO. I mentored them to do so. At first the Add-on are published only after the review by the Human reviewers. It takes some time. Now Mozilla automated it. So the Extension review wait times are get much shorter, You can know more about it here. I covered my experience in detail in my previous blog post.

They are happy to see their add-on get published in much shorter time. Then Dinesh Explained about the Major upgrade for Firefox, which is Firefox57 known as Quantum. He also explained about the Photon.

Wrap Up:

Then the participants Explained What they have developed and learned during these two days. And I make sure of all of them uploaded their code in Github. Som of them are new to Git So I helped them. I also talked with them to actively contribute to the Mozilla Community. Hope they Will 🙂. At last We took a group photo. Here you go.

  Group photo in SRM Hack  

Thank you eveyone for all those who made this event great. The important thing I learned is Community Building. One can Never learn these things in College, I am learning a lot by Contributing and taking part in the Open source Communities 🙂. A special Thanks to Viswaprasath, Karthickeyan and Dinesh.