A decade of writing at Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

A decade of writing at Mozilla

bitstampede.com

188 pointse15ctr0n15 comments

Unfortunately this post won't get many upvotes cause its not negative about an employer (everyone loves dirty drama, the HN upvotes say it all), so I'm quite happy to see someone post about some great work they've done.

Documentation is a long and fairly thankless job, for some reason I don't see bootcamps kicking out technical writers, which is a shame because we need more great technical writing. Thanks for all the hard work making development better for so many!

Oh wow, MDN has been a game changer in documentation IMO. I'm glad to see it starting to show up higher than w3schools for more and more searches (w3schools' page rank is so high since they've been around for forever).

Thanks for writing!

w3schools is where I've gotten most of my DOM/HTML information as a non-web (for the most part) developer - simply because it does show up first in searches. I'd never heard of MDN until now, but it looks really good. I'll definitely look there next time I need to know something.

Here's a modified Google browser search engine to help you out. Adds -site:w3schools.com to all searches: https://github.com/nathancahill/fuck-w3schools

Thanks.

I've had the pleasure to volunteer with Eric on MDN for more or less one year. He and the other staff and volunteers are amazing people. Then I had the pleasure to meet them in person last year in Canada for the Mozilla work week and see how things are organized in person.

It's incredible how much stuff you can churn out when a lot of work is done by volunteers and not only paid staff.

Also, as a volunteer, you have a lot of freedom in starting projects inside the main one, there's a real sense of meritocracy (you are valued for the work you do). I, for example, have been the topic leader for the MDN Glossary, a sub-section of the learning area.

I recommend volunteering on MDN to anyone who wants to start technical writing and needs some guidance.

I appreciate the kind words! We have a ton more to do to get our docs as complete and clean as we want, but with the help if our volunteers, we will make it happen!

Our volunteers are rock stars. Klez is one of our superstars.

One of the best parts of my job is working with volunteer contributors. My favorite experiences often involve helping a new volunteer get started, then watching then help the next one to come along. Klez is one of those.

It's always fun to meet up with our best and/or most prolific contributors at Mozilla-sponsored events, when we fly a bunch of people to one spot to plan the next wave of work, too.

Thanks for the pointer. I'm just starting to toy with the idea of shifting focus towards technical writing, and never would've thought of contributing to MDN (though I've referenced it often enough, of course). I'll give it a look once registration opens back up.

Can you recommend any other resources that've helped you along the way?

> Can you recommend any other resources that've helped you along the way?

Everything you need is available in the meta-documentation[0] and on project-specific DocStatus pages (for example, the one for the Glossary[1] and the more general one for the Learning Area[2]). Also, as a corollary to what Sheppy says in the other reply to your post, ping on #mdn, people are there to help you.

Finally, you can join on the bi-weekly meeting on IRC [3]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Contribute [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Doc_status/Glos... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Doc_status/Lear... [3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN/Meetings/Community

For what it's worth, if anyone wants to open an MDN account to contribute (whether to fix a typo or document a new API), you can ping any of the admin types in irc.mozilla.org #mdn, and we can help you get an account set up.

Thanks for writing!MDN has been nicely documented and very very useful, especially for beginners in web dev.

Love this. As a technical writer, seeing another writer -- especially one so prolific -- positive about this job is really great. Ten years, damn.

Congrats on the 10 years and thanks for the inspiration that is MDN! Respect.

And +1 to the sentiment in the comments here. As a marketer and technical writer on an open source project, documentation is an often overlooked part of what makes a good project great. It's a somewhat thankless task, since if done well few really notice and if done badly it's painfully obvious.

Loved it. I didn't know that you are doing in-browser editing. Is that done with document.designMode ? On top of any particular rich text editor?

Great work, much appreciated.

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