Categories: SUMO Nation

Mozillian profile: Dinesh

It’s my great pleasure to introduce a guest blog post today by one of our hyper-active contributors who make a difference for many users out there – Dinesh! Take a seat and listen to his story…

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Hello everyone,

I’m Dinesh from India. I’ve been contributing to Mozilla since 2014. I’m a techno freak and a code lover. I am an undergraduate with a background in Electronics & Instrumentation, but I found my biggest passion to be programming and designing – both led me to learning about graphics design and front end development.

Being a techie, while I was exploring the world of open source, I came across Mozilla & its efforts to keep the web open. When I registered for the FSA program, I found a lot of people from India contributing to Mozilla in many ways and I became a part of the Mozilla India Community.

Since 90% of my fellow students lag in their basic technical skills and practical knowledge about programming, I thought of sharing my knowledge about open source and other technologies through our Mozilla Community. I’m the only Mozillian in my region within a 500 miles radius. This motivated me to build a new local community – Mozilla Tirupati.

Mozilla Tirupati was started by me along with a few of my friends. We took the guidance of Mozilla Reps and Regional Ambassador Leads for FSA program in India in order to build a strong community. More than 200 students registered for the FSA program as part of our Mozilla Tirupati Community and we have organized 15 events which includes a Maker Party, a Womoz Pop-up, tech talks, Hour of Code, the Fox Yeah campaign, Firefox OS App days, Mozstalls[1,2], community meetups – and more! For my huge efforts, I was recognized as FSA of the month, May 2015 & FSA Senior.

The biggest problems we faced in building our community are the resources like a good space, proper internet connections, but also the retention of new contributors. However, we are extremely happy that a couple of colleges offered their resources for us to continue our good work.

My contributions to the functional areas at Mozilla varied from time to time. I started with Webmaker by creating teaching kits and Thimble makes, but I also put effort into promoting web literacy and teaching front end development at various events. I’m proud for being recognized as a Webmaker Supermentor by Michelle Thorne. Additionally, I focused on promoting Firefox OS by developing apps for the Marketplace. Since Firefox OS apps can easily be built with HTML & JavaScript, I enjoyed developing two mobile applications about Tirupati and the Mozilla Community here. My next big area of contribution is Quality Testing, because I find it always fun and interesting – especially checking the test conditions and triaging bugs. I was awarded  with Web QA Enthusiast Digital badge by Web QA Team.

After a while of contributing to these projects within Mozilla, I thought of Support Mozilla. I realised that there was a huge gap in the Knowledge Base in Telugu, my native language. I decided to change this by building a team of localizers who could help millions of people access the internet safely and easily in Telugu. We made great progress from the first day, and now I am the Locale Leader for Telugu.

At the moment we are planning to include our local SUMO team contributors in making Firefox even better and easier to use in Telugu.

As you can see through my story above, it’s easy to get started with something you like. The best thing out of everything is the global connection with many great people who always support and guide new people at any time.

Dinesh, a Proud Mozillian

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