Developer Bootcamp 2014 : Day 1

It has been almost a year since we came together as a community, as Mozilla Kerala, where 18 passionate volunteers from across Kerala became Mozillians with a common dream – a better Web. We talked, inspired and got inspired. It has been a wonderful time for us as a community – since then on. We did a lot of things, organized several events and took part in lots of activities. We taught little kids to code; we taught senior citizens how to use Internet safely; we introduced Firefox OS to developers; and what not!

After Webmaker Malappuram, we, Mozillians were hanging out on the beaches of Calicut when jsx had an idea. He identified that the developers of Kerala weren’t coming to the forefront because they didn’t have the technical experience or exposure that was required to start contributing code. So, we discussed and planned how to bootstrap the developers in Kerala. And that is how the idea of the Developer BootCamp came into being.

“Let’s do a developer bootcamp next. Aim is to get people started to contribute code to Mozilla projects. The event can comprise of sessions on version control, setting up the development and build environment on a local machine, creating patches, finding starter bugs to work on, using bugzilla, getting help from the community etc.”

That was a little brief overview of the community, the idea of bootcamp was born during our last community meetup (Meetup 2.0), where we saw there were geeks who were ready to contribute to open-source projects, but the major hindrance for them was how to get started, so that is how we planned to have a event that helps them boot-up their dreams. The initial plan was to take 20 geeks who can code and introduce them to the essential tools and other resources that is involved in community-driven projects like Mozilla, Linux, etc.

This spark was implemented from August 9-10, 2014 at Asset Summit Suites, Kochi and hashtagged #BootCampKerala.

Day 1

Anush welcomed everyone to the Developer Bootcamp. He introduced the guests from Mozilla India. After this, he gave the stage to Soumya Deb for his talk on Introduction to Mozilla Projects.

We had short tea-break and returned back for the Introduction to Bugzilla. Anush led the session on Bugzilla. He used an example of “How to make a Tea” (bug 49) on Mozilla Kerala Bugzilla. He went through the total life-cycle of how a bug works in Bugzilla.

After learning the life-cycle of bugs, we moved on Version Control systems. Our next session was on Git. Deb gave an introduction to Git and then Anush took over to teach the participants how to use Git. He started from scratch – from the installation of git to how to push code to Github, fork projects, contribute code, pull, merge, etc.

Mike Cooper, Web Developer, SuMo joined us via Skype to talk about General work-flow and projects in Mozilla ecosystems.

We managed to capture the fun and excitement of the event into a small mix-up video, thanks to Athul Suresh for the great work.