Congratulations to Saurabh Nair, who is the MDN Contributor of the Month for May 2015. He was selected from among the MDN contributors who received an MDN Star badge in May for significant contributions to MDN.
Saurabh has been contributing to MDN since 2011, and became more active in the last year. He was one of the participants at the Hack on MDN weekend in Berlin earlier this year. He is on the “spam watch” team, who look out for spam pages, deleting them and banning the spammers as soon as they appear. Since he lives in India, he can do this while MDN staff members in Europe and North America are sleeping.
Here is an interview with Saurabh, conducted via email:
When and how did you get started contributing to MDN?
I started referring to MDN docs in 2011 when I started my web development career. Whenever I found typos or errors, I used to correct them. I would also add links where more clarification was required and such. But it was only in 2014 that I began to spend more time on MDN, still mostly for my own learning, but doing editorial reviews, etc. Around that time I got involved with the MDN community also, which is a really nice bunch of people.
The first full article I wrote on MDN was on a new CSS property called will-change, under guidance from Jean-Yves Perrier. Writing it was a great learning experience and finishing it was gratifying. I’ve written a couple other full articles since then and looking forward to write more. Also, it fills me with pride every time I see one of the articles I wrote translated by someone I don’t know to some language I can’t read. Seriously, I feel like Shakespeare right about then. 🙂
How does what you do on MDN affect other parts of your life, or vice versa?
I’m a web developer by profession, and very interested in the happenings around web technologies. Correctness and clarity are very much stressed at MDN. For instance, I once witnessed a discussion on the #mdn IRC channel about whether to use the word “updated” or “overwritten” in an article. The difference was subtle in the case, but it still mattered, and was valued and debated. I know for a fact that working on MDN has improved my knowledge and in turn improved the quality of my office work. Also I got to meet a number of great people through MDN, and that has positively affected my personal life too.
And in reverse, being a professional web developer has made it kind of easy and natural for me to work on related things on MDN.
What advice do you have for new contributors on MDN?
Everything you do is valued, whether it is tagging articles, doing reviews, writing, or just about anything. If you like technical writing and learning about new web technologies, helping with MDN is going to be a really rewarding experience.