Our newest Friend of Add-ons is Shubheksha Jalan! Shubheksha has been involved with the add-on community since last year. In December, she was accepted to Mozilla’s Outreachy cohort to work on web-ext, a command line utility to help make WebExtensions development more awesome.

At first, getting involved in the open source community proved challenging for Shubheksha. After spending two years trying to break into various open source projects, she began searching issue labels on Github for good first bugs and beginner issues. One bug in particular stood out because of a comment from Kumar McMillan that read, “I can mentor this.”

Shubheksha says,

“Now that I look back at it, that one single comment played a huge role in helping me muster enough courage to take it up. From then on, it sort of became a routine and I found myself very eager to work on web-ext everyday after my classes in college were over. “

Fixing that first bug was only the beginning. Since then, Shubheksha has closed 22 add-on bugs and is authoring an article on web-ext for Mozilla Hacks.

Contributing code to Mozilla projects has given Shubheksha a taste of real-world software development and has helped develop and refine her skill set. She says,

“I learnt to navigate and read through a decently sized codebase. I learnt how to write code that makes it testable, how to write unit tests using stubs, spies, etc,. I also learnt a variety of debugging techniques for a node JS. I learnt a ton about writing ES6 Javascript and surrounding tooling, especially Flowtype, a static type checker for Javascript. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience. My mentors, Kumar and Luca, have been incredibly helpful and supportive throughout the way and I can’t thank them enough for investing all their time and patience.”

You can read Shubheksha’s blog post about getting involved in the open source community here.

If you’re interested in contributing code to add-on projects, please take a look at our onboarding wiki.

Thanks to all the code contributors, developers, reviewers, and users who pitch in to make add-ons awesome. We encourage you to document your contributions on the Recognition wiki.

We are looking forward to collaborating with you in 2017!