I guess, it's time now to talk about an activity that I have been doing for quite some time. Since almost a year, I am a contributor to Mozilla's Automated Testing Team. I've been learning all this stuff about Python programming, but I didn't find a real way to use it properly. Anyone who followed my blog (I doubt there is such a person as I am not actively promoting it) will know that I had a couple of semi-useless projects on the go, but these all died down for one reason or another.
In the end, I became aware that Mozilla is an Open Source project and aside from the core developers who are employed full-time, anyone is invited to join. I was quite sceptical at first, but once I figured out how to use IRC, I was ready to go (Now it feels odd to think that at one point I didn't know how to ;) ).
For anyone who is willing to improve his skills and is not afraid to be thrown in at the deep end, it is a truly awesome experience! From day one, I was welcomed and everyone had a lot of patience. There are a lot of online resources and when you're completely stuck, you can always go and speak to someone on the IRC channels. I first made my way through Bugs Ahoy! until I figured out how to use Bugzilla and at some point, I was shoved towards various sites on Github to help out on there.
Because it is such a big project not only entailing Firefox and Thunderbird, but several other aspects, as well, there is quite a variety of programming languages being used such as JavaScript, Python, HTML/CSS, Java, or C++. So if you really want to learn something new, there is a lot of opportunities to practice it within the community, as well.
All in all, I am glad I took the step and got involved. There is no pressure and everyone can contribute as much or as little as they want. I am quite proud to say that I have contributed quite a few lines of code to mozdownload and I had a blast doing it!
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