First Event of AIT-Pune Moz Community held at AIT on 8th April 2017
Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
The journey from college to corporate life is huge, few are scared to step out of their comfort zone while others are excited into exploring the new life. I was thrilled to get out of college as I wanted to work on real projects that can enhance my skills and knowledge unlike the theoretical classroom teachings. At the beginning it is fun and you get to learn something interesting every day, meet new people and build yourself. However, it becomes boring and dull at some point of time and you need a change in life. Learning stops after some time but the craving to learn more increases. It becomes impossible for you to stick to the same mundane routine of travelling to the office, stay there for 9 hours and then come back home to eat and sleep. Then on weekends we plan to hang out with friends. At such a point in life we need to do something, and attend events to learn something new.
Then there was an idea that my friend, Abhijay Ghildyal, had in his mind to start a Mozilla Community in our own college, Army Institute of Technology, Pune. First, it was necessary for us to know about the organization and its aim. I got the information from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/. The club works towards supporting the open web. Their projects, products and principles are designed to help people take control and explore the full potential of their lives online. There are several Mozilla Clubs that actively participate, throughout India and there are platforms through which Mozillians communicate and share their events, interests on social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Telegram. Every community has their group on Twitter and Facebook, blogs on Telegram and Git. Thus, Abhijay was inspired and came up with an idea of creating a Mozilla group of our college, AIT- Pune Moz Community.
The first step towards building this community was to gather few members who are willing to contribute to open web. It was necessary to provide them with enough links so that they understand the aim of this group. It started with around 12 members from AIT College who are mainly from second or third year. We created our own group and joined as many Mozilla groups on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram. AT this point we had team members full of enthusiasm. Vigneshwer Dhinakaran(http://blog.mozillakerala.org/author/dvigneshwer/) who has been Mozilla representative of Mozilla India for a long time helped us in organizing this event and introduced us to other Mozilla Representatives. After several efforts by all the members of the community, we could finally conduct an event on 8th April 2017, at Army Institute of Technology, Pune.
Prathamesh Chavan(https://reps.mozilla.org/u/prathamesh/), another representative of Mozilla India started the session with an introductory note on Mozilla Community and interesting anecdotes on the history of open source contributions. He talked about the time when people were unwilling to share their source code but the time changed with the introduction of Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds, because of whom the source code became readily available for people to contribute to web with ease. He even mentioned about the history of Dennis Ritchie towards the development of programming language C, which is of an utmost importance and it is a base of all programming languages used today. It was a great beginning to the session as the audience became aware of Mozilla Communities worldwide and their purpose. The session even brought up interests in the audience to be a part of the community.
The next session, on Mozilla localization was conducted by Aniket Deshpande(https://reps.mozilla.org/u/djaniketster/), who was very much interested in creating an open, informal and an interactive session, thus, he asked the audience to sit on the floor. Mozilla Localization is about translating a web browser in different languages so that people across India can access web with ease. It aims at accessing web without cultural and linguistic barriers. This is another way to make sure to sure that the web is open and accessible to everyone. It works on the motto “Many Languages, One Mozilla ”. Aniket contributes towards Mozilla by creating web in Marathi and he talked about his work, showed us the browser in Marathi language and explained few things about it.
A major session on Rust language was held by Vigneshwer Dhinakaran. The session took place using Hangouts. He told us about complex data structures, the syntaxes of the language and a code on hello world. It also explained us about the easiness of the language. The most interesting fact about the language is, it prevents segmentation faults and provides high performance. It was admirable that Vigneshwar could give us some time into explaining about the rust language. For more information on Rust Lang visit https://github.com/rust-lang.
After two hours of back to back sessions, we finally had Tushar Choudhary(Third Year, Information Technology) and Amit Singh(First Year, Information Technology) to give an interactive session on WebVR, which is a framework to build virtual reality experiences. By the end of the session, both of them could convince the audience that HTML code could be interesting using AFrame. Even the ones who had least of interest in Technical aspects were motivated into using HTML code to develop web. We were amazed to see a demo on WebVR created by Amit Singh, but the part more interesting than that was, it required only a few lines of code. He explained the entire code and we were awe-struck to see few lines of code prevails into a virtual reality experience. Even though it was the last session but people had their eyes set on the speaker and attentively listened to the entire talk. Kindly watch this demo on WebVR by Amit Singh: https://bornfromashes.github.io/sastimasti/
It is a normal trend for all corporate workers in IT sector, that is, to work hard and party harder. We spend our life in doing a day job on weekdays and hang out with friends for drinks on weekends. How about we go for an alternative way of doing something fun, and learning at the same time. The experience to do something and learn something new can come from attending several other Mozilla events, hackathons that will be held in Pune. Apart from interesting learning sessions, we also got an opportunity to interact with people who came from other colleges. I met, Rishita Bansal, from Commence college, who has been a part of Mozilla since 1.5 years and she attends Mozilla events held across Pune. She explained about her experiences and shared her knowledge and I gained more insights into the Mozillian World. Mozilla is a platform where we got an opportunity to organize and learn something new. If you want to convert you dull and mundane life into something creative, participate in Mozilla events and learn as much as you can.
Shraddha Nayak 