2017 was one Crazy-Amazing year for me, full of learnings, challenges and new exciting things. I can say that one of the best things happened to me in 2017 is Mozilla. I have learned a lot of things by contributing to Mozilla. I will try to Summarize my journey and all the contributions I have done so far in 2017 here.

March:

I came to know about MozillaTN Community. I introduced myself and They specified about the various contributions pathways to Mozilla.

Then Viswaprasath, Mozilla Rep and Mentor at MozillaTN asked me to create a website for the Campus club, That interested me and to my surprise, I managed to build that and host it on GitHub pages within 2-3 days. Being new to Github and other work flow it’s a difficult thing to achieve that in 3 days :smile:.

Then MozillaTN community organised the first ever over night hackathon at KCG college of Technology chennai. It had two tracks Web Extension and WebVR. I am on the Web Extension track. Through that event, I got a good understanding of how to build the Web extensions and learned about different APIs.I blogged about my experience in that event here.

PS: This is my first blog I ever wrote :sweat_smile:.

April:

I started participating in the QA events like Web Compatibility,:beetle: Bug triage and Bug verification Days. MozillaIndia QA team usually conduct these activities three days in a week. We have to update the number of Bugs we have worked on in Bugzilla in the Etherpad. Through this, I learned how to report a bug and triage it. As a part of the recognition of it, My name is listed under the Best contributors in their Blog post. :tada:.

June:

I started playing around with the WebVR using Aframe.Aframe is an Awesome framework used for Building virtual reality experience in Web.

Then Viswaprasath made an announcement about Week of Contribution in mailing list :e-mail:. If you want to know what Week of Contribution is all about here is the overview of it.

Weeks of Contribution is one of the amazing series of online event where first time contributors get started contributing to Mozilla

This time its about WebExtension. Each week there will be 3 session in the IRC channel on Monday, Wednesday and Friday between 09:00 PM :clock9: and 10:00 PM :clock10:. It will be running for 5 weeks, so there are 15 sessions.

July:

So June month is all about learning a different APIs used in the web browser and building a small add-on using that. And at the end of session Viswaprasath give a small exercise to all the participants. During the session, We discussed the APIs, and the queries we had while building the small-addon using the API we discussed in the last session. It’s good to learn from all the Participants and we shared our knowledge between us.

I should emphasize here that It’s a great way of learning things. I learned a lot of stuffs. Huge thanks to Viswaprasath for volunteering his time to do all these things :rocket:.

Few APIs we discussed are

  • Omnibox API
  • Alarm API + Notification API
  • ContextMenu API
  • Tabs.query API and few others.

Few Add-ons we are thought and built during the sessions

  • Muti Search Engine
  • Water Remainder
  • Youtube playlist Controller

September:

This has been a great month. MozillaTN hosted the open hackathon for web-extensions in the Software Freedom Day. which means the students, employees, and anyone can join in that. I had an opportunity to meet the Mozilla reps Viswaprasath, Karthickeyan, and Dinesh, also Mozilla Regional Coordinator Prasanth. I know all of them through their telegram handle only, All of them shared their experience and their learnings with me :innocent:.

Coming back to the Hackathon part, Since I already had some experience with building and web-extension. Viswaprasath told me to help other participants to clear all their queries. It’s great to share my learnings with the participants :blush:. I helped them to solve the problems they face and suggested Correct API to use based on their idea.

In the mean time I also started working on my addon.This hackathon is conducted as a part of series of events conducted over India. In which they select the Best add-ons from India. So these kinds of events are conducted in Hyderabad, Coimbatore and few other places in India.

I developed a Live-Editor add-on using Javascript which we can check our HTML and CSS code easily. After that I published the add-on in AMO.

October:

Follwed by SFDHack17, MozillaIN conducted the next hackathon in SRM University, But this time I am there as a mentor along with Mozilla Reps to guide the participants. I helped them to clear their doubts and also helped them to publish their add-on in the AMO also for the India level competition.

It’s a two days hack and it’s great to see lot of them are intrested to develop their add-on and eager to learn. Totally it was an amazing experience for me as a mentor :smiley:. Also I am Very happy for the event went great. You can see a more information about this in my SRM_Hack blog post.

Also as a part of HacktoberFest conducted by Digital Ocean and GitHub, I contributed to the two MozillaIndia websites.

November:

At last after all the events conducted over India by the respective community over there. Now it’s a time for Final Result. In the mid of November the result was announced. I am very happy to see my add-on LiveEditor was selected as a Best add-on in the Whole India along with two other add-ons. As a

Also November was a big month for Mozilla also, Since the Firefox Quantum was launched and it made a huge impact. Another good thing is I am invited to be part of the MozillaTN Functional Team. We also had a Community call for how we can improve and how to involve the new contributors.

December:

Another good news, now it’s from the MozillaUS Team I has been selected as a member of Mozilla Add-ons community board. I just applied for the position after seeing this blog post. I really amazed after seeing this email.

Hello, brand new Feature Board members!

I’m very excited to welcome you to the start of your six-month project focused on helping AMO. Millions of users rely on this collection to find the best extensions for Firefox.

Right now is a particularly interesting time to participate in AMO’s process. With Firefox Quantum launching just days ago, this means only content built with WebExtensions API is compatible with the browser. So you’re the very first Feature Board to be fully focused on curating this new, modernized type of browser content.

As mentioned in the email, We are the first set of Feature Board after the Firefox Quantum release. As a side note, my add-on now has a 100+ users and having 750+ Downloads.

  100 users  

  100 users  

I really have to thank you, everyone, in the Mozilla community for making this Year special to me :innocent:. special thanks to Viswaprasath and other MozillaTN team for their guidance. Expecting 2018 will be the year for more responsibility :sparkles:, and More Learning :computer: and Sharing :confetti_ball:. Once again Thank you everyone! for making this year more Awesome! :tada: