The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is one of the most frequently used resources for web developers for all things documentation and code. This year we’re making the rich content on MDN available to even more people. We’re developing beginning learning materials as well as a template (which we’re calling “Content Kits”) to make preparing presentations on web topics much easier.
As part of this effort, we also launched the MDN Fellowship last quarter. This is a 7-week pilot contribution program for advanced web developers to expand their expertise through curriculum development on MDN. MDN Fellows are experts that will continue to grow their skills and impact by teaching others about web technologies. Specifically, the Fellows will be developing Content Kits, a collection of resources about specific topics related to web development to empower technical topic presenters.
After a lengthy process where we solicited applications and involved reviewers from across Mozilla, we’re delighted to announce our inaugural MDN Fellowship Fellows! Here they are in their own words – feel free to Tweet them a congratulations!
Steve Kinney, Curriculum Fellow (Colorado, U.S.A.) – @stevekinney
I am an instructor at the Turing School of Software and Design in Denver, Colorado, where I teach open web technologies. Prior to Turing, I hailed from the great state of New Jersey and was a New York City public school teacher for seven years, where I taught special education, science, and — eventually — JavaScript to students in high-need schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I have a master’s degree in special education. I’ve spoken at EmberConf and RailsConf, and will be speaking at JSConf US at the end of the month. In my copious free time, I teach classes on web development with Girl Develop It.
István “Flaki” Szmozsánszky, Service Workers Fellow (Budapest, Hungary) – @slsoftworks
I’ve been following Service Workers’ journey since before it was cool as a web developer and longtime contributor to Mozilla. Known as “Flaki” in the community, I’ve been evangelizing new technologies to make the Open Web a first-class citizen. As Service Workers seemingly play a key role in this battle, there is no better place to do this than at Mozilla, the most adamant proponent of the Open Web. During my Fellowship I hope to further previous work on MDN’s offline support, while helping in the explorations into Firefox OS’s reimagined new architecture.
Ben Boyle, Test The Web Forward Fellow (Upper Caboolture, Australia) – @bboyle
I’m a front-end developer from Australia, making websites since 1998 primarily for the Queensland Government. Lots of forms, templates and QA. I also mentor front-end web development students at Thinkful. I got interested in automated quality control using custom stylesheets and scripts in Opera, then YUItest, then inspired by ThoughtWorks developers on a project when they introduced selenium and automated acceptance tests in the browser. I’m excited to be helping Test The Web Forward as an opportunity to both learn and share. Because everything runs off browser. Love the latest front-end frameworks? They don’t exist without web standards. I cannot sufficiently appreciate the work so many people have done creating a solid foundation for everything we (as web developers) often take for granted. I am really glad to have this chance to give back!
Vignesh Shanmugam, Web App Performance Fellow (Bangalore, India) – @_vigneshh
I’m a Web Developer from India focused on building the Web Performance platform at Flipkart, one of Asia’s leading e-commerce sites. I am also responsible for advocating front-end engineering best practises, developing tools that help identify performance bottlenecks, and analyzing metrics. I am an Open Source contributor with a deep research background in front-end performance and am happy to be a part of the MDN Fellowship program to contribute to MDN’s Web App Performance curriculum.
Greg Tatum, WebGL Fellow (Oklahoma, U.S.A) – @tatumcreative
My background is in contemporary sculpture, aquarium exhibit design, marketing, animation, and web development: in short, it is all over the place 🙂 But the central guiding principle behind my work is to find the middle ground between the technical and creative, and explore it to see what emerges. I am a Senior Web Developer at Cubic, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based creative branding agency where I help create rich experiences for tourism and destinations. I applied for the MDN Fellowship because I’m passionate about the open web and inspired by the possibilities of using 3D for new, richer experiences online with the potential reach that WebGL can have. I really enjoy helping to build the creative coding community and hope to make it even easier for more people to get involved with my own passion of exploring creative code.