Namaskar, Sat Sri Akal, Bonjour!
This blog is about the recently concluded community enabler event organized by Dyvik, Aastha and me in Hyderabad on the night of 7th January 2017, named ‘Mozathon’.
This event’s main objective was to have a Mozilla Hyderabad community that was as strong as it was way back in the days it was active and had a diverse pool of talent, not only in the technical field but also in the non-technical field. A community that can have the required energy to act as the growth engine of Mozilla India and can act as a back bone and also as a helping hand for all the other geographical teams in Mozilla India.
Having have kept our aims high, the planning started more than 2 months ago with the idea to have such an event and to end the deadlock of events after the #MInM2016 meetup. The main motto was to have not only the existing Mozillians attend the event and restart their engines of contribution but to also have a completely new set of fresh talent who can be the future of Mozilla Hyderabad.
Thus, after 2 months of planning and preparations, we had the stage set for the first event of 2017 in Hyderabad starting at 6:00 PM on the 7th of Januray going on till the 8th of January.
The event thus started with Dyvik taking the introduction session, introducing the Mozillians who were going to speak and giving a brief introduction to Mozilla and what all were we going to cover in the event.
After all the introduction, we had our first session on Localization and the need for it with a pre-recorded video of Aastha explaining the same. This was the first among the various topics that were to be covered on that day.
After the session, we had Dyvik taking over from Aastha and explaining in detail about Marketing and Branding, why are they important, what is the difference between them and how is localization related to this. Being a MBA student, he was able to do an out-of-the-box job in this session 😉 Dyvik’s session was followed by a session by Harsha Bandaru on game development using Construct 2.
We then headed for dinner, as the time was already 9:30 PM and the participants were starting to feel hungry. Oh! Did I forget to mention that we had Pineapple Kesari sweet for dinner too which was my personal favorite 😛
As soon as the dinner was done, we had an over-the-air session by Aastha on designing, in which she first explained what Mozillians in general do when they say they contribute to Mozilla through designing. After this, we gave all the participants papers and sketches and asked them to go through the issues in GitHub and use their creative minds to draw something cool. Man-o-man, you won’t trust me! But we got some really cool designs which blew off our minds. Even one of the main designer of Mozilla India(Aastha) was in awe and was full of praises for the participants! Some of the designs being :
There are several more photos. You can find them in the photos bucket(link below)
The designing session continued for almost 2 hours and finally we finished the designing session at around 12:30 AM. After that, it was high time to have some fun. We started off with the Game of Seven with a lot of laughter involved in the game. After the Game was some time to do some entertainment. That is when we had 2 male participants doing a Fashion walk in the middle of everyone and then of these 2 along with another participant danced on the Bollywood song ‘Baby Doll’ for everyone! That was one heck of entertainment! Then it was time for everyone to dance and not just be mute spectators. Thus, all the participants danced on What does the fox say, Gangnam style, lean on, etc. Watch the excitement below!
(After all the participants became shy, we had to turn the camera off, though :P)
We then came back to focus on the main tracks. I started off with my session on Rust at around 1:30 AM and the plan was to have the session finished by around 3 AM(you’ll find the reason below). We started off with some participants installing Rust in their laptops while the other had already done that.This took roughly 15-20 mins. After that, we started the session with me first going through an example of a Hello world program which the participants did in their laptops too. After this, I started teaching the basics of Rust with implementation of all that the participants learnt using an example of the guessing game, written in the Rust docs.
The participants were so active(I literally haven’t seen any participant this active even in the day, forget about 2 AM!) that they kept asking question which kept me awake all the time too 😉 The session which was supposed to finish by about 3 AM finally ended up taking up a lot more time and finished at round 4:30 AM, thanks to all the time it took to answer all the questions of the participants and accommodate the requests of all the participants to execute each and everything that they learnt and not just the guessing game example. This boosted me to give in more of my efforts too!
After this, we had some more fun and then it was time for Ram Dayal’s session on WebVR. As per the plan, we decided that we wouldn’t go much deep into the WebVR subject and that based on the interests of the participants, we would have regular meet ups dedicated for the specific project.Thus, Ram took about 40 mins for his session.
As per the original plan, I was supposed to finish my session on Rust by 3 AM and Ram was supposed to finish his session by 3:30 AM and after that, we were going to have a mini-hackathon till 8 and then we were going to conclude the event but the enthusiasm of the participants was so high that all the targets of ending sessions on time was blown up and we had no time left for the mini-hackathon. Since it was only about 6 AM by that time Ram decided to take in questions from Participants to know the questions they had from the event and answer them. After that, we finally took the feedbacks of all the participants for the improvements of our future events and finally concluded the event by giving out swags to the participants and giving tees to the most active participants of the event and on twitter(#Mozathon).
I would like to thank all the speakers(Dyvik, Aastha, Ram Dayal, Harsha Bandaru and myself :P), the Mozillians(Madhukar and Abhilash) and most importantly, the amazing participants who helped us with making this event a success! My best take out of this event would be the enthusiasm of the participants who were inquiring about the next events in Mozilla Hyderabad and not bothering about their sleep. And at the end of the event, what excited us was the energy and happiness of the participants even after the end of the event!
Thank you for reading the whole blog! Hope you liked it 🙂
Regards,
Deepak
Mozilla Rep
Pics of the event can be found here : https://flic.kr/s/aHskM4CUyV