Exploring Things ......

First and Foremost " Happy New Year 2012".

Recently I have been exploring a lot of things which demands an article completely dedicated to it.

Mozilla Web QA Team :

Recently I started contributing to the Mozilla Web QA (Quality Assurance ) Team. Thanks to Matt Brandt for his support and motivation. I worked on two projects for Mozilla , the affiliates and the mozillians projects. As a part of a QA team we conducted various Exploratory , Manual and automated tests on these websites. The main focus of the projects for the release was the Browser-ID authentication system. We conducted a lot of tests on the new authentication system (Browser-ID) for the websites affiliates and mozillians. In this process I did make some good friends working at Mozilla. Matt Brandt (QA Lead on Input, Breakpad, Affiliates, and Mozillians) being my mentor for all my ventures , Stephen Donner (WebQA Manager for Mozilla ) for motivating me through the process. I even did had a nice  chat with developers of mozillians and affiliates on IRC channels #affiliates and #mozillians.

The Most important thing that drove me towards contributing to the Mozilla projects was the transparency with which they operate all there activities which include development ,testing or release of the products. All of there projects are Opensource hosted on github.

I did learn a lot of stuff during this venture. 

• I started coding in Python and writing automated test cases for testing websites. 
• Learnt the working of Selenium server and use of it for automating test cases.
• Understood the complete life-cycle of a bug.

Python :

Motivation behind learning and coding in Python mainly came from Mozilla . Mozilla's most of their projects require Python knowledge and since I started contributing to the Mozilla Team , I needed Python for writing unit and automated test cases for testing websites. I learnt most of the stuff about Python from a book "Dive into Python" and Markana tv videos on Python.

Python is indeed a great language and it was always my dream to code in Python some day but did not get enough motivation and time .

Github repo for Python code snippets https://github.com/rShetty/pythology.

Javascript :

Motivation behind learning Javascript was the project for my 7th sem (The QA Portal). To bring dynamicity and to implement events to the site we needed Javascript . I started my Journey to learn JavaScript with book "JavaScript: The definitive guide " One of the finest books of all times for JavaScript. Further I explored the Jquery Library in JavaScript which is just Mind Boggling Library.I also coded in node.js  (Javascript platform for building fast ,scalable applications ).

Github repo for the Javscript https://github.com/rShetty/jsbits.

So far it was great experience exploring stuff . Hope in 2012 I explore more awesome stuff and Primarily code more :)