Hello everyone, Thanks for dropping by!
Welcome to the last blog of my Outreachy series. This blog is all about the highlights, learning, up and downs, and altogether a wrap-up blog of my Outreachy internship.
I couldn't believe time flew away this fast, I must say this was the best experience of my life. When I applied for Outreachy, I was an underconfident geek, and Today, surely I can say I have grown so much. I can clearly feel the difference and I am quite proud of myself. Tadaaa 🚀🎉
In frame - My mentors and me
So let me first introduce myself again...
I am Janvi Bajoria, an undergraduate student from India. I was selected as one of the Outreachy interns for the May '22 cohort working on the project "Firefox Picture-in-Picture improvements" with the Mozilla team under the guidance of Katherine and Niklas.
Firefox logo by seeklogo .
Initially, I wondered about how to proceed further. It would be very hectic to manage everything at once while writing blogs every two weeks at the same time. I was not very familiar with writing blogs before my Outreachy internship, although I had written a couple of blogs before then. The opportunity to document my internship in the form of blogs motivated me to start content writing, and now I’m in love with writing out my thoughts and sharing them with others. My mentors also supported me by reviewing my blogs every time and giving feedback on how to improve them. Thanks to them for this kind gesture. I plan to continue writing blogs on various topics in the coming time. Stay tuned! 😉
Let's talk about the amazing things that happened during the internship. The most rewarding thing for me is gaining confidence in myself. I have evolved into a more passionate human towards my work and career. I contributed, fixed, and added new features to such a large codebase and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) Mozilla Firefox which I consider an achievement for me.
The Outreachy internship helped me grow my technical and communication skills. I learned how to write unit tests and how to localize Firefox using Mozilla's Fluent system, and worked with Fluent strings. I learned how to implement new control buttons from scratch along with their UI and functionality. I also learned various git, Github, and version control terms which will further help me to contribute to Open Source with ease. Along with these, I got to know about various terms like Accessibility, High contrast mode, UI/UX, Specifications, QA, etc. I learned how to communicate effectively and how to document my work. I really liked how my mentors documented each meeting's notes and shared useful resources, links, pictures, demos, etc. in one place.
I am fortunate enough to find such supportive mentors guiding me at each step, despite the fact that we were in opposite time zones. Whenever I was stuck in my work or I didn't understand something, I immediately asked them and they were always there to help me out. They provided me with meeting notes, documentation, useful resources, meeting recordings, and whatnot. They introduced and connected me to the Picture-in-Picture team, as well as weekly and bi-weekly Firefox meetings. They gave me feedback on my work and blogs, and they also told me what areas I need to improve or work on.
Outreachy has made me confident in working with a large codebase. It helped in expanding my network and connecting me with like-minded people who are enthusiastic about Open Source. I made connections with people from all over the world. I made sure that I did not miss any Outreachy chats, which happened every two weeks. Thanks to the Outreachy organizers for managing them so well.
I worked on the Picture-in-Picture product of the Firefox browser. I implemented new features, some of them for adding new controls like the Fullscreen button and seek buttons, as well as subtitles support in the Picture-in-Picture window for various video streaming sites, etc. I fixed various bugs too. I look forward to contributing even more in the future by finding and fixing bugs for Mozilla Firefox.
The internship was indeed the best experience of my life and all the credit goes to Outreachy, my mentors, the Mozilla community, and my colleagues. Looking forward to more Open Source contributions and upcoming internships.
Thanks for reading! Please check out my other blogs here.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Linkedin, or reach out to me via email.
If you have any inquiries about Outreachy, feel free to reach out. :)