A highly productive “Hack on MDN” weekend in Berlin

About 30 Mozilla contributors gathered in Berlin over 27-29 March to collaborate for the second annual “Hack on MDN” weekend. Together, we achieved our goal of producing a ton of useful outcomes that will improve MDN in different ways, including code, content, community, and processes.

Here is a list of the projects that were accomplished. All of them were worked on collaboratively, so if I miss mentioning everyone who worked on each thing, I apologize.

Platform Code

• Proof-of-concept for offline use of MDN, implemented with Service Workers, by Szmozsánszky István (Flaki).
• Prototype Metrics dashboard for MDN, using Google Analytics and database queries, by Rabimba Karanjai, Rob Hudson, Luke Crouch, Justin Crawford, Jannis Leidel, Akshay Aurora.
• A prototype for opening MDN code samples in JSFiddle, by Flaki, Eric Shepherd (Sheppy), Jérémie Patonnier, and Akshay.
• A prototype for an annotation system for MDN editors, implemented as a Firefox add-on and back-end server, by Andre Garzia.
• Proposal and mock-up for slicing MDN into smaller sites, by Vladimir Krstic, with input from Sheppy, Franceso Iovine.
• Design improvements for viewing MDN on mobile devices, by Thierry Régagnon.

Content

• Additions to the Learning Area glossary, by Biraj Karmakar and Liu Xing (Meteormatt),
• Refactoring CSS pages to make them better structured for users and for Firefox Dev Tools to use, by Jean-Yves Perrier, Julien G (Sphinx), Florian, Saurabh Nair, Will Bamberg, Thierry, Sebastian Zartner.
• Code samples and articles related to Touch Events. This resulted in a touch-based game, Touch Horizon, available on Github, and a draft article on Touch gestures and events, by Francesco Iovine, Andrzej Mazur, Niklas Barning, and Sebastian.
• Article on writing a game in Canvas, from scratch, with code samples at every step, also available on Github, by Andrej, Niklas, and Rabimba.
• More code samples! by Andre Garzia
  • Added Image Uploader on the Web Activites, Network Information API, Notification API articles
  • Added Contact Exporter on the Contacts and the Device Storage API articles
  • Added simple Telnet Client to the TCP Socket API article
  • Added Cyber Orb to the device orientation API article
• For MDN Content Kits: created a template kit, updated the wiki page, and created an index page for Content Kits on MDN, by Justin Crawford, Stormy Peters, and Havi Hoffman.
• Curriculum plan for MDN Fellowship orientation, by Diane Tate, with input from Michelle Thorne, Laura Hilliger, Stormy Peters, Ali Spivak.

Community

• A draft of new recognition system and process, by Biraj Karmakar, Ali Spivak, and Janet Swisher.
• Badge for participants of the weekend, by Biraj Karmakar and Janet Swisher.
• MDN Youtube channel with screencasts on contributing to MDN, and the Learning area, by Biraj Karmakar.
• A plan for expanding the current “Wednesday Docs” meetup concept to more general MDN meetup-like events.
• Roundtable discussion about the history of the MDN community, in preparation for our 10th anniversary celebration, later this year. Recorded by Niklas, with a bunch of people participating.
• Plans for an HTML tutorial, by Jérémie and Thierry.

Processes

• Plan for Q2 work on the browser compatibility project, by Sebastian, Rabimba, Jérémie, and Luke.
• John Karahalis led a tutorial on using Git and Github for those not familiar with these tools.