Please meet our newest Friend of Add-ons, Viswaprasanth Ks! Viswa began contributing to Mozilla in January 2013, when he met regional community members while participating in a Firefox OS hackathon in Bangalore, India. Since then, he has been a member of the Firefox Student Ambassador Board, a Sr. Firefox OS app reviewer, and a Mozilla Rep and Tech Speaker.

In early 2017, Viswa began developing extensions for Firefox using the WebExtensions API. From the start, Viswa wanted to invite his community to learn this framework and create extensions with him. At community events, he would speak about extension development and help participants build their first extensions. These presentations served as a starting point for creating the Activate campaign “Build Your Own Extension.” Viswa quickly became a leader in developing the campaign and testing iterations with a variety of different audiences. In late 2017, he collaborated with community members Santosh Viswanatham and Trishul Goel to re-launch the campaign with a new event flow and more learning resources for new developers.

Viswa continues to give talks about extension development and help new developers become confident working with WebExtensions APIs. He is currently creating a series of videos about the WebExtensions API to be released this summer. When he isn’t speaking about extensions, he mentors students in the Tamilnadu region in Rust and Quality Assurance.

These experiences have translated into skills Viswa uses in everyday life. “I learned about code review when I became a Sr. Firefox OS app reviewer,” he says. “This skill helps me a lot at my office. I am able to easily point out errors in the product I am working on. The second important thing I learned by contributing to Mozilla is how to build and work with a diverse team. The Mozilla community has a lot of amazing people all around the world, and there are unique things to learn from each and every one.”

In his free time, Viswa watches tech-related talks on YouTube, plays chess online, and explores new Mozilla-related projects like Lockbox.

He’s also quick to add, “I feel each and every one who cares about the internet should become Mozilla contributors so the journey will be awesome in future.”

If that describes you and you would like get more involved with the add-ons community, please take a look at our wiki for some opportunities to contribute to the project.

Thank you so much for all of your contributions, Viswa! We’re proud to name you Friend of Add-ons.