Who am I?
- One of YOU! -- Part of the community
- Mozilla Representative
- Open Source Contributor
- Goes by "CuriousLearner" all over the web
Learn new skills
- Not just coding skills or learning yet another framework
- A lot of skills
- Coding, debugging, testing, writing docs, collaboration, etc
- Soft skills
Improve existing skills
- Improve on things you don’t know
- Learn intricate details
- Get feedback from mentors (and all of the world)
Meet like-minded people
- Explain what you are hacking (working) on
- Listen to what other people are working on
- Learn in the process
Learn people skills
- Team management
- Resolving internal conflicts
- Brainstorming on a new feature
- Public-speaking
- Time-management
- Conducting meet-ups/conferences
Learn to READ
It’s not just literature, but:
- Documentation
- Development guide
- The source code
“Code is meant to be read more times than it is written”
Find mentors
- An opportunity to learn from domain experts
- Volunteers are out there waiting to help everyone and anyone
- Learn any skill you want from the experts
- Respect everyone's time
Teach others
“While it is important to get your code reviewed, it is much more important to review other's code.”
- Learn different coding styles.
- Learn from the experience of the others.
- Advocates healthy discussions and code reviews.
“Code reviews are hard. But they help a lot in improving skills.”
- Skills of both the mentor and the mentee
It feels great to make (small) changes
- Gratifying to see the whole world rely on the small code changes you did
- You don't necessarily need to work on big features in a project or become a life-long contributor
- A small change in the documentation matters - it isn’t something inferior
- Get to learn tools such as Sphinx and (re-Structured Text) rST
Building your reputation and career along the way
- A demonstration of how you write code and what you can do
- A depiction of how you work with others
- Experience in working with people having diversified skill-set
- Get that commit bit flipped when you've contributed (a lot) & community starts trusting your actions
Why do I contribute to Open Source?
Mozilla’s mission says a lot about it
“Doing good is part of our code”