Mozilla add-ons workshop at Sahyadri College, Mangalore

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Background

About 2 months earlier, there was a workshop on Mozilla add-ons and A-frame conducted by two resource persons and Mozilla representatives in collaboration with AMIGOS, NITK at my univversity. I had the pleasure of attending it, and I must say, it was a good experience. But once it was done, and that being exam time, I never took a second look at it.

It was only about a week ago when we attendees were asked if anyone would be interested to take up a workshop at a neighbouring college. I called the organisers and another speaker friend of mine, and expressed my interested. Now at this point, I really did not know much about add-ons, and neither did I have any experience in making and submitting one. It was just my interest to learn and explore that pushed me to take this opportunity, and boy, I am glad I did. My university end-semester exams were running till 26th (which was just the evening before the workshop), and so I had just one day to learn something so intricate and powerful. Just recovering from a week of exams, the last thing I needed was another all-nighter and a few more cups of coffee. But I did not have a choice, did I? The next day, I was supposed to teach and explain something to a crowd of excited developers something that I was not very familiar with myself!

Sailing with full force

So there I was groking on a steaming pile of youtube tutorials, documentation and all the other resources I could muster in one night, ready to make a crowd of over 30 (which was pretty huge for a first-timer) make their own add-ons and publish them to the Mozilla store. Ofcourse, I wasn’t alone. A friend of mine was supposed to conduct the workshop along with me, and that gave me some company.

So the next day we start with the workshop at around 11 in the morning, and it definetely did not kickstart the way we would have hoped for it to. Turns out the crowd was mostly first years who had not much experience in HTML/CSS/JS and so it all that we did flew over their head (sic).

We discovered this during the lunch hour, and right before their hands-on-session was supposed to start! Realising this, we decided to start with the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript first. So I spent the first hour post-lunch on how to use HTML to make a basic page, how to use CSS to style it, and how powerful JS can be to do dynamic tasks. Then I went on to creating a very basic add-on of adding page border to any webpage we visit, and asked the students there to make one along with me.

It was at this point that the attendees started to get a hang of what’s happening and how the flow was. Things were kicking into the right gears, and this made them very interested to learn more, and that was just the motivation we needed. So all of worked on an add-on together and then went on to give it some more functionaliy. We put a thick red representative border on any website that isn’t safe (we used JS to get the protocol details of the website) and some green dots around any that was safe. This was something I felt would be useful in our everyday life, and relatively simple for a first-timer.After this, my friend gave a demo of how to publish one on the Mozilla store, and helped them publish the one they just made.

So by the end of it, every person in the audience had made an add-on from scratch, and even published one in the Mozilla store. They were all now Mozilla developers!! And this was an immensely satisfying experience for me, and a great start for the first session I ever conducted as a resource person. Absolutely amazing.

Acknowledgement

I express my gratitude to Mozilla, AMIGOS NITK (ACM-Mozilla Campus Club), and SOSC Sahyadri for having me on the platform to guide my fellow developers to become “Open Sourcerers”, and giving me a opportunity to learn so much along the way!