Today I introduced a bunch of people to Firefox DevTools at the FSMK Sunday School. The Sunday School is a weekly event organised by the Free Software Movement Karnataka in Bangalore every Sunday. I covered most of the features of DevTools, apart from the profiler. I had the opportunity to discuss in depth on each of the tools given that I had around 2 hours of time.
Audience
The audience for the Sunday School usually comprises of students, but today I saw a mix of juniors and seniors. Only 7-8 people turned up for the session. Even though the number was way lower than expected, it gave me the opportunity to interact with every participant personally. They were mostly technical people with some knowledge of web designing/development. So it was easier for me to make them understand the concepts behind DevTools.
The session
It was an entirely hands-on session. Most of the participants had laptops with them, and they were encouraged to test each and every thing shown to them. I started off with the inspector, went on to style editor and then on to scratchpad. All along, the emphasis was on how these tools can be effectively used in regular development tasks.
A majority of the audience knew about Chrome’s Inspector tools, so they were mostly at home using the DevTools. There was a moderate level of interactivity between the participants as they tried to understand the concepts behind style editor and scratchpad, tools which they don’t find in Chrome, or which don’t perform that nicely in Chrome.
The session ended with a nice set of discussions on how to contribute to Mozilla, particularly to DevTools itself, and with a nice round of tea. A big thanks to the FSMK people for the hospitality. Hope we collaborate even more in the future.