MozSAARC13-learnings and takeaways

Last weekend (23-24 February 2013) we had the first Mozilla South Asia Inter-Community meet-up. Participants consisted of Mozillians from the South-Asian region, namely Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It was a great experience to meet some of the awesomest people from around the region. They have already blogged and shared their experiences of the event. Since the event has already been compiled in such a detailed fashion, I would like to take the time to share my learnings from the event.

First of all, it was great to see that we as mozilla south asian community have done some world class work in localization of Firefox, Firefox-OS and related products. The Bengali and Sinhalese versions of firefox were commendable and have been serving the purpose very well.

Secondly, I got to learn about the Mozilla Webmaker project, a project which teaches you to be able to Make something amazing with the Web and not become mere consumers(or leechers). The project consists of three high quality tools namely Popcorn, Thimble and X-Ray Goggles. Popcorn, a tool to enhance and create web videos seemed quite interesting as it pushed the limits of the web and used the real power of HTML5. Thimble and X-Ray Goggles are projects to get to a feel of literally “making” the web. Using Thimble we can create and preview html pages in an interactive online editor whereas X-Ray Goggles pushes the limits to “remix” any existing web page and recharge it with our content and imagination. More details can be found on the webmaker website.

Next up was the most anticipated project of the year, “Firefox OS”. I as a developer, am highly focused on the web as a platform and this project has made every Web Developer’s dream come true. Basically, we can create native mobile apps for the platform using the language and tools we love the most (HTML, CSS, JS on VIM :D). We got a chance to use a developer device and it seemed pretty promising.

Finally, the event was much better than my expectations and we came up to some concrete decisions. I look forward to supporting and working with the community for a better and an open Web. This reminds me of a line that one of my friend once told me, “Firefox is my OS”. I guess, it is pretty much true today.