I feel awesome

There are a lot of reasons I contribute to Open Source. One, is to give back something to the people from whose work I've benefitted greatly, to get to collaborate with smart and congenial people and, honestly, to build my resume! What I did not anticipate was that getting accepted into a community makes you feel so special. The Mozilla community was greatly supportive to me the entire way, with trainings, conferences, online meetings, work weeks when they could have done even without me. I truly felt that I was being accepted into a community .

The thought of having even the tiniest effect on a ubiquitous piece of software is thrilling. Your name on the beautiful Firefox monument in San Francisco and on the Mozilla contributor credits page. This thrill may be a narcissistic one, but I feel it's alright to revel in it. I don't see anything wrong with feeling satisfied that you've applied your skills to promote a product that millions of people use to browse the web.

Beyond the code

I am a terminal junkie and spend most of my time at work writing/forking code which I am not fond of. I like attending events, it is the place where you get to meet people with different backgrounds to talk, collaborate, learn and create. Also, I am shy and don't like giving talks or speaking at conferences. There are a lot more things that interests me - events, conferences, engaging with the users, community building, social media et. cetera. Over the course of years, I organized events from kitchen table meetups to a fully packed conference for Mozilla which created a great impact in one form or the other. I now lead the Events & Campaings task force of Mozilla India. Few of the events:

• MozCamp Beta India '14
• Mozilla India Community Meetup '14
• Firefox Launch Party '14
• Maker Party | Hive Pop-up Bangalore '13
• FirefoxOS App Days '13

There are companies that do not let their employees spend time on external projects. I am quite happy to say that the company I work for, do not have that problem, on the contrary, they even motivate employees to contribute back to open source or any volunteer service they are interested in.

It's rewarding

1. You get to meet, collaborate and learn from a ton of smart people.
2. Drive a program you love with the help of others.
3. It is through Firefox Student Ambassadors I started my contribution and now I am the President of FSA Exec Board.
4. You get to launch a product (FirefoxOS) in your country. Ain't that cool?
5. You learn to be awake all night (and day).
6. I lied. I did give a couple of talks.
7. More here

It's fun

Now what?

You probably already know, but in case you don’t, then we have a volunteer-run Mozilla Community Space in Bangalore supported by Mozilla for people passionate about the open web to meet, share, learn, hack and collaborate in person. It is how great outcomes happen and great products are made. Poke/tweet to the Space Wrangler, i.e., me, if you wan't to join us at the community space.

"Contributing to open source is a great high; I can’t wait for the coming years!"