We’re excited to highlight the work of Serah Nderi, a volunteer contributor to Pontoon who has quickly made a meaningful impact on the project. Since getting involved earlier this year, Serah has contributed a steady stream of improvements — including 10 patches in just the past two months — ranging from good-first issues to fully fledged features.
Serah joined the Mozilla community as an Outreachy intern on the SpiderMonkey team, where she demonstrated both strong technical skills and a passion for languages. That combination naturally led her to Pontoon, where she has been contributing not only as a developer but also as a localizer, exploring translations for languages like Kiswahili and Kikuyu.
Her latest contribution introduces long-awaited functionality for editing and deleting comments in Pontoon, improving collaboration and moderation workflows for translators and project managers alike.
You can follow Serah’s work on GitHub and connect with her on LinkedIn.
Last year, I earned a B1 certification in German and TOPIK I certification in Korean. This year, I decided to explore something at the intersection of technology and languages, which led me to start contributing to Pontoon.
Pontoon is Mozilla’s web-based localization platform, used by thousands of contributors to translate Firefox and other Mozilla projects into hundreds of languages.
I began by adding Kiswahili translations and exploring localization for my mother tongue, Kikuyu. While Kikuyu doesn’t yet have a project manager and presents unique challenges, it made the experience even more interesting. After working on a few good-first issues, I decided to take on a larger challenge: implementing a full feature—the ability for users to edit and delete comments.
Previously, users could only add comments. If a comment contained a typo or needed clarification, the only option was to add another comment. This often led to cluttered discussions and made collaboration less efficient. I set out to improve this experience.
Under the hood
The frontend implementation had a natural starting point. Pontoon comments already included actions like pinning, so adding Edit and Delete followed a similar interaction pattern.
One of the main challenges was handling comment content. Comments in Pontoon are stored as serialized HTML paragraphs with support for @mentions. To enable editing, I needed to deserialize this stored content back into the editor so that users would see a fully functional input field pre-populated with their original comment—including mentions. When saving, the content is serialized again before being stored.
In addition to the UI changes, I implemented the backend views for editing and deleting comments, along with the necessary tests. The final result allows users to edit and delete their own comments, while project managers can delete any comment for moderation purposes.
This feature makes discussions in Pontoon more flexible, reduces noise from duplicate comments, and improves the overall collaboration experience for localization teams.
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