Contributing to Open SourceJustin Potts

Mozilla Core Contributor

What Is a Open Source?

"Denoting software for which the

original source code is freely

available and may be

redistributed and modified"

Companies in Open Source

Why is Open Source

Important?

• 98% enterprises are using

OSS

• Influence

• Quality

• Efficiency

• Cost

What is Mozilla?

Mozilla is an open source company split into a foundation and a corporation. Their mission goes along the lines of "To create a community of people that believe in keeping the web open and free."

A Brief History

• March 31, 1998 @ NetScape

• 10,000 people payed for a full page ad in the NY Times in

2004 - the day Firefox 1.0 launched

• Has contributors on every continent... And yes, Antarctica.

• In 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded and set a Guinness

world record for most downloads in 24 hours.

• 2013 marked the launch of Firefox OS and their 15th

anniversary

How I Got Involved

• Google Code-In 2012 Finalist

• March 2013

• Editorial reviews for documentation

• Moved to QA in February 2014

What I Do Now

My "title" is the Senior Automation Engineer for mozillians.org, and QA Project Lead for

(Not official, I just like saying it...)

I work on a team of six, including myself.

How You Can Get Involved

• Find a company that has a mission that

appeals to you

• Choose a particular field that you think you

would enjoy (Documentation, Development,

QA, UI/UX...)

• Look for ways to contribute (Bugs that need

fixing, bugs that need filing, design

improvements, documentation

creation/updates...)

Benefits of Contributing

• Get invited to events

• Increased job prospects

• Potential internships

• Connections

• Recommendations

How Computer Science

Helped Me

• Fundamentals

• Resume Builder

• Broader knowledge

• Diversity in available projects

Things To Do

• Learn more languages ( Python and JavaScript)

• Find an interesting open source project

• Get familiar with the software

• Learn more tools

• Stimulate yourself outside of class (competitions, hackathons, meetups...)

Check Out Some of My Work

• https://www.github.com/justinpotts

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/user_profile?login

=moz.justinpotts%40gmail.com

DEMO

Questions