I have been contributing to Mozilla for some time now and so, I got the opportunity to attend Mozilla Summit 2013 at Santa Clara. Contributors from all around the globe turned up to attend the Summit which was going in parallel in 3 places: Santa Clara, Brussels and Toronto.
Finally, I met Mathjazz at the Summit. We had been working for a long time on Pontoon and were communicating over the internet. Not only did I meet Mathjazz, but his Mozilla team from Slovenia. We had some discussions on Pontoon and it’s roadmap. I attended the i18n and l10n discussions led by Axel from Mozilla and got more insight into the process. I had some discussion with Axel on plans to integrate l20n with Django and Python in general. It did not seem that straight forward. Axel asked me to get in touch with @jezdez on this.
I also met the Erik Rose, the creator of nose, dxr and many other awesome tools. I had contributed to Erik’s nose-progressive in the past. It was an honour to have a conversation with him.
3 days passed like anything. There were loads of awesome talks and discussions and group activity. I was involved in brainstorming on what Mozilla could do in the Cloud space along with Sayan, [erickt] (https://github.com/erickt) and others. It was great to meet fellow Mozillians from around the globe. I enjoyed the chats I had here and there with fellow Mozillians during the conference.
As for me, I had been mostly busy hacking on Waartaa during the conference. Well, Waartaa is “A web IRC client written in Meteor JS. It is aimed towards being an intuitive, collaborative IRC client across multiple devices of the user along with centralized logging”. Have a sneak peek into it.
I tried to speak with as many people as I could about my project and I was looking for potential contributors. I also pitched about Waartaa on stage, but it did not go well. The open session on waartaa was worse. It was just me and 14 empty chairs. It felt terrible, but I kept hacking on it all by myself. I believe in the idea and that’s what that keeps me driving. Fortunately, I met Marienz from Freenode and shared with him my work and idea on Waartaa. I expressed my concern with the privacy of user data when using and the trust factor. He gave me some useful pointers towards SASL, IRC extensions, etc. that’d help me to find a solution for the issues we discussed.
It was great to be part of Mozilla Summit. Events like this get you charged up to start contributing to Open Source in full throttle. After coming back from the event, I started contributing to Firefox’s devtools. Till date, 3 of my patches have been merged to Firefox’s codebase. It feels great. Also, I made substantial progress on Waartaa. Sayan started contributing to Waartaa. I hope to get an initial release very soon.