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Comment by klez | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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