Spokesperson from Mozilla

Hello, so we had a guest from Mozilla come in to our class last week. His name is Christos Bacharakis and he’s a community manager at Mozilla. He talked about his experiences with open source - how he got into it, what were his motivations/goals, what kind of projects he’s worked on, where he’s been and what keeps him going. Overall it was a pretty good presentation and it was interesting to see how his curiosity led him to different things. He started out attending an open source convention in Germany from where he talked to various people and found out about all these projects he could get involved in and help him develop his skills as a developer. From there on he’s just picked on and worked with several open source projects including Fedora. He mentioned how you don’t always have to write code or be a developer to contribute to projects and said that he himself enjoys mentoring and public speaking because he’s an outgoing person and said that that’s what he does at Mozilla. He also mentioned that at one of his open source projects he basically did translations from English to Greek (he’s of greek native), proving that you can use whatever you’re good at to contribute to open source. He also gave a number of resources to aid us in our journey to pick open source projects to work on for the course of the semester or even beyond! So it was a helpful resource as I’m currently struggling to pick projects that will interest me and keep me motivated to work on and I also got some insight into the number of ways that I can contribute. But as for my search for projects, the search still continues. I will be back next week hopefully with better news. That’s all for this week, thanks for checking in!