As I mentioned earlier in this year, I have had the pleasure of working with Vaibhav. Now that time has passed he continues to contribute to Mozilla, and he will be participating this year in Google Summer of Code with Mozilla. I am excited.
He now has a blog– while there is only one post, he will be posting ~weekly with updates to his GSoC project and other fun topics.
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I remember right before the winter break where I was off for a couple of weeks to end the year, A new person showed up and started working on some of my bugs. This was Vikas and he was eager and motivated to do a lot of great things. Fast forward to today, and I still chat with Vikas weekly in irc. When he gets a break from school and other activities of interest, he will be hunting for bugs to fix and usually knocking them out 3 or 4 at a time. In fact, I was surprised when I did a query on bugzilla, and on github to see that he is involved in a variety of projects at Mozilla such as Phonebook, Marionette, Talos, and test automation.
I wanted to learn more about Vikas, so I asked him some questions
Tell me about where you live?
Currently I live in Goa, India which is famous for its beaches and attracts many tourists from both India as well as foreign nationals. The best thing about this place is my campus which feels like a home away from home now. I like this place for its beautiful weather, its beaches and ever friendly nature of people living here. This place has brought a lot of changes in my personality and has given me a chance to make some new friends who are always ready to help.
Tell me about your school?
I am a first year undergraduate student at Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa Campus (popularly known as BITS Pilani Goa) pursuing Msc.(Hons) Economics. I am enrolled in a dual degree scheme offered by my college where in I get an option to take a B.E degree depending on my first year’s performance and I hope to get a C.S major. My favorite subject so far has been Computer Science as I’ve always been fascinated towards computers and love to code
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
My first interaction with the Mozilla community was when I started using firefox few years back. Last December I decided to start contributing to some open source organizations and searched for organizations to start with and decided to go with Mozilla. I started with Mozilla since its a very large community so there’s always lots of help available. My experience with Mozilla community so far has been absolutely great, I had no idea how the open source community works and was afraid to ask silly questions as I thought people wont have time to answer those questions. I remember when I was assigned my first bug and Joel Maher was my mentor, while setting the local environment I kept on getting errors and used to pastebin those to him and it took me hours to set it up but he was totally cool with it even though I myself was annoyed with those ever lasting errors. Even now I get stuck at some places but he’s always there to help me. Besides him there are other members too who have helped a lot and are always ready to help if required. My experience so far has been brilliant and am looking forward to learning new things and meeting some great people in the future as well.
What hobbies and activities do you enjoy doing?
Nowadays I spend most of my time coding and learning new stuff. I love the concept of open source software and love to interact with the community and gain valuable experience. Besides coding I enjoy playing football, cricket, and am a complete movie buff. I also love to hang out with friends and spend time with them.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Down the lane in 5 years I see myself as a software engineer working for Mozilla (preferably in the Ateam) solving problems and developing new tools.
What advice would you give someone?
Although I don’t see myself as someone who can advise about life but If someone asked me I’ll advise him/her to enjoy life to the fullest and do whatever he/she loves to do no matter what others expect them to do and if they are related to the software industry obviously I’ll advise them to contribute to the open source community 🙂
I have enjoyed watching Vikas learn his way around Mozilla. If you have worked with him, you probably already know why I have enjoyed my interactions with him, if you haven’t had the chance to work with him, say hi in irc, his nick is :mishravikas.
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I have had the pleasure to work with Vaibhav for the last 6 weeks as he has joined the Mozilla community as a contributor on the A-Team. As I have watched him grow in his skills and confidence, I thought it would be useful to introduce him and share a bit more about him.
From Vaibhav:
What is your background?
I currently reside in Pilani, a town in Rajasthan, India. The thing that I like the most about where I live is the campus life. I am surrounded by some awesome and brilliant people, and everyday I learn something new and interesting.
I am a third year student pursuing Electronics and Instrumentation at BITS Pilani. I have always loved and been involved in coding and hacking stuff. My favourite subjects so far have been Computer Programming and Data Structures and Algorithms. These courses have made my basics strong and I find the classes very interesting.
I like to code and hack stuff, and I am an open source enthusiast. Also, I enjoy solving algorithmic problems in my free time. I like following new startups and the technology they are working on, running, playing table tennis, and I am a cricket follower.
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
I have been using Mozilla Firefox for many years now. I have recently started contributing to the Mozilla community when a friend of mine encouraged me to do so. I had no idea how the open source community worked and I had the notion that people generally do not have time to answer silly questions and doubts of newcomers. But guess what? I was totally wrong. The contributors in Mozilla are really very helpful and are ready to answer every trivial question that a newbie faces.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I see myself as a software developer solving big problems, building great products and traveling different places!
What advice would you give someone?
Do what you believe in and have the courage to follow your heart and instincts. They somehow know what you truly want to become.
In January :vaibhav1994 popped into IRC and wanted to contribute to a bug that I was a mentor on. This was talos bug 931337, from that first bug Vaibhav has fixed many bugs including work on finalizing our work to support manifests in mochitest. He wrote a great little script to generate patches for bugs 971132 and 970725.
Say hi in IRC and keep an eye out for bugs related to automation where he is uploading patches and fixing many outstanding issues!
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