Hello, SUMO Nation!
Do you still remember Dinesh? Turns out he’s not the only Mozillian out there who’s happy to share his story with us. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Jayesh, one of the many SUMOzillians among you, with a really inspiring story of his engagement in the community to share. Read on!
Jayesh
I’m Jayesh from India. I’ve been contributing to Mozilla as a Firefox Student Ambassador since 2014. I’m a self-made entrepreneur, tech lover, and passionate traveller. I am also an undergraduate with a Computer Science background.
During my university days I used to waste a lot of time playing games as I did not have a platform to showcase my technical skills. I thought working was only useful when you had a “real” job. I only heard about open source, but in my third year I came to know about open source contributors – through my friend Dinesh, who told me about the FSA program – this inspired me a lot. I thought it was the perfect platform for me to kickstart my career as a Mozillian and build a strong, bright future.
Being a techie, I could identify with Mozilla and its efforts to keep the web open. I registered for the FSA program with the guidance of my friend, and found a lot of students and open source enthusiasts from India contributing to Mozilla in many ways. I was very happy to join the Mozilla India Community.
Around 90% of Computer Science students at the university learn the technology but don’t actually try to implement working prototypes using their knowledge, as they don’t know about the possibility of open source contributions – they just believe that showcasing counts only during professional internships and work training. Thus, I thought of sharing my knowledge about open source contributors through the Mozilla community.
I gained experience conducting events for Mozilla in the Tirupati Community, where my friend was seeking help in conducting events as he was the only Firefox Student Ambassador in that region. Later, to learn more, we travelled to many places and attend various events in Bengaluru and Hyderabad , where we met a very well developed Mozilla community in southern India. We met many Mozilla Representatives and sought help from them. Vineel and Galaxy helped us a lot, guiding us through our first steps.
Later, I found that I was the only Mozillian in my region – Kumbakonam, where I do my undergrad studies – within a 200 miles radius. This motivated me to personally build a new university club – SRCMozillians. I inaugurated the club at my university with the help of the management.
More than 450 students in the university registered for the FSA program in the span of two days, and we have organized more than ten events, including FFOS App days, Moz-Quiz, Web-Development-Learning, Connected Devices-Learning, Moz-Stall, a ponsored fun event, community meet-ups – and more! All this in half a year. For my efforts, I was recognized as FSA of the month, August 2015 & FSA Senior.
The biggest problems we faced while building our club were the studying times, when we’d be having lots of assignments, cycle tests, lab internals, and more – with everyone really busy and working hard, it took time to bridge the gap and realise grades alone are not the key factor to build a bright future.
My contributions to the functional areas in Mozilla varied from time to time. I started with Webmaker by creating educational makes about X-Ray Goggles, App-Maker and Thimble. I’m proud of being recognized as a Webmaker Mentor for that. Later, I focused on Army of Awesome (AoA) by tweeting and helping Firefox users. I even developed two Firefox OS applications (Asteroids – a game and a community application for SRCMozillians), which were available in the Marketplace. After that, I turned my attention to Quality Assurance, as Software Testing was one of the subject in my curriculum. I started testing tasks in One And Done – this helped me understand the key concepts of software testing easily – especially checking the test conditions and triaging bugs. My name was even mentioned on the Mozilla blog about the Firefox 42.0 Beta 3 Test day for successfully testing and passing all the test cases.
I moved on to start localization for Telugu, my native language. I started translating KB articles – with time, my efforts were recognized, and I became a Reviewer for Telugu. This area of contribution proved to be very interesting, and I even started translating projects in Pontoon.
As you can see from my Mozillian story above, it’s easy to get started with something you like. I guarantee that every individual student with passion to contribute and build a bright career within the Mozilla community, can discover that this is the right platform to start with. The experience you gain here will help you a lot in building your future. I personally think that the best aspect of it is the global connection with many great people who are always happy to support and guide you.
– Jayesh , a proud Mozillian
Thank you, Jayesh! A great example of turning one’s passion into a great initiative that enables many people around you understand and use technology better. We’re looking forward to more open source awesomeness from you!
SUMO Blog readers – are you interested in posting on our blog about your open source projects and adventures? Let us know!
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