Thank you.
Hi, everyone.
Who here knows MDN?
Make some noise, make some noise.
Who here knows open source?
No, no, no.
It's faster.
Come on.
Right.
So welcome.
Hi, I'm Pranchu.
I'm the community manager at MDN.
Yeah, I do the community stuff over there.
I'm based out of Berlin.
I've been a Muslim contributor since 2015, so I've been around.
Yeah.
You can find me on the internet or after the talk.
I'll just say hi.
Cool.
agenda.
What are we doing here?
So we'll go over what's MDN?
How do we do MDN?
And what does the future look like?
I just wanted to give a small peek into the open source side of MDN.
Not just the product that you see every day.
Yeah.
And we'll have a short Q&A.
At the end.
Cool.
So who, what, and why is MDN?
MDN, as you know, is the Mozilla developer network.
It's the open source documentation platform.
That covers everything web development.
So HTML, CSS JavaScript mostly.
But then, pretty accurate document.
You've been there.
All right.
Our full values.
This is what makes MDN MDN because we have to be very active.
We have to be very accurate and reliable.
Before anything goes on MDN, it's collaborative and community-driven.
We've got a bunch of contributors.
You'll see the overall number later.
And we're very inclusive and dynamic.
We have to change as the web changes.
Right?
It's been through a lot of iterations over the year.
We'll go through that as well.
Awesome.
So the evolution of MDN.
By the way, it's the 28th year of MDN.
Right?
It's two decades of period.
Thank you.
It was launched in 2005 as Devmo by Mozilla.
It was just a community-vicky dedicated to web standards.
It got rebranded to Mozilla developer network in 2010.
I think that's where people started flowing in mostly.
In 2017, a lot of companies in the tech industry joined.
They joined the PAB and they started contributing to MDN as well as a part of their documentation.
And in 2020, we moved the Vicky to our new GitHub.
That's where our core is, our content is.
It used to be a Vicky.
And then in 2022, we launched MDN+.
Right?
So I'm going to share some screenshots from the past.
And whoever has seen that at some point in their life makes them nice.
Why?
Okay.
Some people, right?
Whoo!
Okay.
What about this one?
Yes, right?
Yeah.
This was me as well.
This was my first MDN as well.
Right?
And what it looks like now, right?
I'm not sure if you've been there recently, but this is what it looks like.
And yeah, I love it.
It has us fall, but I love it.
Right?
But then what is MDN today?
I talked about it being a documentation platform, right?
For web developers, but it's more than that.
So first and foremost, web docs for sure.
Right?
But we've expanded into loan.
There's a structured curriculum because we see an influx of new web developers every day.
We have the MDN blog, which did not exist for a very long time.
But yeah, we've got tips, we've got tutorials.
I'm not sure if anyone's focused on temporal recently, JavaScript temporal.
Yeah.
We wrote about that and it just went first on hack news, which was amazing.
First time in my life, something which I'm involved in has gone to hack news number one.
So yeah.
MDN plus, I'm not sure if anyone here is subscribed to MDN plus, but do check it out.
And tools like playground for life coding and observatory.
Something that was missing for a pit in the middle, but MDN adopted it.
And it's now security tool where you can test out your headers and make sure you're up to date.
Now, we have the foundation of MDN, the community, right?
All-time contributors we've had 143,000 and more.
And that's just from the GitHub stats, right?
And more is because we had a wiki and that's not what we've counted here.
We have 51 public and active repositories, right?
These are just the public ones.
We have 100 more in the back end, where a lot of examples or workflows,
which shouldn't really be touched or infra is.
And MDN is now available in eight languages.
Seven of them are maintained by localization communities all over the world.
And one is an experiment that we're running for German, which is machine translation,
but we also have a community behind it which reviews and make sure that everything is up to date
and nothing is out of context.
Yeah?
Right?
So, the open source side of it, how do we MDN?
Right?
MDN is built on these three pillars, which is core.
It's got content.
It's got MDN platform.
It used to be called Yari, which we launched in 2020.
But right now, we're putting it to a rust space platform, which is Rari.
It was written in React, it got very clunky.
The build time went over one and a half hours.
So, yeah, you can't wait for one and a half hour build time every time.
We've got BCD, interactive examples, small bits, translated content and workflows.
That's the core of MDN.
Then we've got a list of examples, right?
I'm not sure if you've been to MDN, but does somebody want to guess how many pages there are on MDN?
Many sounds right?
More than two.
That's correct.
We've got 15,000 pages on MDN.
Right?
And then there's the planning pillar, where the community comes in, MDN core data, about MDN and project planning.
Right?
Now, all of that mess relates to roles and teams, right?
The way we manage our community depends a lot on how we structure our teams.
Because when you're on GitHub, right?
When you're contributing, a lot of labels come in.
A lot of contributors come in.
A lot of spam comes in and you can't.
Your GitHub is already pretty full.
Notifications are an nightmare, honestly.
But again, if there's a lot of spam, it gets in.
So, we depend on these pillars for our teams and each team has a role.
And we've got workflows and auto laborers to make sure that the right person gets notified.
Right?
Now, whenever we have a PR come in, we have three pillars there, where we have default owners,
and they get notified for everything.
Every tech writer or every engineer gets notified of what they're responsible for, what their policies are.
But we've also got content based on different technologies and examples.
So, we have invited experts within the community who also get notified for these,
so that they could come in and help out with their expertise, right?
We've also got product documentation.
So, whenever a new Firefox comes in, we've got release notes, which are hosted on MDN,
and for the add-ons and the extension API.
Right?
Labels are crucial.
I'm not sure if you can see this, but for pull requests in our platform,
we've got 127 labels, and that's because everything needs to be categorized the right way.
We've got what 136 issues, and even within discussions, we've got 58 labels.
And with the auto-labeled workflow, we're able to categorize them and distribute them in the right way.
Working style, so every contributor has a different working style, right?
I mean, you sit on your laptop, you want to focus and work, but how do you see your workflow?
And for each one of them, we've got a different project board.
We've got a different notification area, and how do we reach out to them?
So, it's pretty flexible, but again, it's difficult to manage.
Right?
Our contributors have their own tools, right, which were very grateful for just last week.
We launched NMDN awesome repository, so that we could document these tools,
and there could be sharing within the community, and they could use their own tools.
Right?
Now, where does the community live?
Get up, of course.
We've got a learning community on Discord, and we've got socials for the external community.
Right?
And who is the community?
So, I just want to share three pillars of our community.
I would say, because one is an expert.
Josh, he helps us out with JavaScript.
Houchen is one of our Korean content localization lead.
He helps us out a lot with localization in Korean,
and wrangling the team as well, and OWD, which is one of our major partners who help us out with,
I think, 50% of the browser compatibility data that you see on MDN, and a lot of the content.
Right?
All this comes with challenges, and those challenges are communication,
when you have 200 contributors who contribute to your repository,
every week, how do you communicate with them?
Right?
With every change, you have to create many discussions, discord.
So, that's a big challenge for us, which we have to be on top of everyday.
Up to date content, MDN has to be accurate and reliable,
so we're very focused on making sure that our workflows relate to that,
retaining new contributors.
We've got a lot of experts, so it's very overwhelming for new contributors,
which is a big challenge for us.
Trust.
MDN has to maintain a lot of trust with our contributors,
because, again, accurate, reliable content.
And spam, spam.
We've got a lot of spam.
And if you've been a part of a big GitHub organization,
you've noticed these come in, because people want their links posted on your GitHub,
because it's a high traffic area, and yeah.
So, we've got a stay vigilant, and I'm very happy to have the community members
that I do to help us out with these.
Right, milestones.
And these are the milestones, which has helped us deal with a lot of these problems.
GitHub week.
Every six months, we do a GitHub week, which helps us clean out our repo.
Clean out discussions, clean out PRs.
And then content call.
We do this every two weeks, so that we can list out all the PRs we need help with.
And over-communicate.
We did a team revamp recently, and a discussion triad recently.
Again, a complete cleanup.
And project boards maintain project boards.
Folks, it's very important.
Right.
Where does MDN manage, I think I can skip this for time?
Yeah, future for MDN.
So, for the MDN community, what we're focused on right now is engagement, recognition, and growth.
Right?
Because we've had the community to maintain documentation and maintain the platform on MDN.
But how do we engage them?
Right?
That's been a big, big missing piece there.
And that's what we're focused on right now.
We recently started the Contributor Spotlight Program for MDN, which has been amazing.
And growing the learner community, because MDN has a lot of curriculum and those learners come in,
but they don't have a place to go.
Right?
So, we want to host them and make sure that they learn development with us.
Right?
This is a code by Mitchell Baker.
The Internet offers untooled potential for humanity to make the most of it.
We need to think of the Internet as ours.
I think the suits MDN the most, because we need to think of MDN as ours.
Right?
And I don't have a special code for you, but I just want to say Contributor MDN as simple as that.
Right?
Yes?
Join us.
Please help us fix issues, improve content, localize content, and also bring our friendly questions.
You can find everything you need at MDN.dev slash community.
That's it.
Any questions?
Any feedback?
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.