Categories: Developer Engagement

MDN Contributor of the Month for June 2015: Sebastian Zartner

Congratulations to Sebastian Zartner, who is the MDN Contributor of the Month for June 2015. Sebastian has contributed a lot to both the content and structure of the CSS reference, including creating a JSON API for CSS pages, and a macro for CSS syntax.

Sebastian Zartner at Whistler, BC

Photo: Sebastian Zartner

Here is an interview with Sebastian, conducted by email:

When and how did you get started contributing to MDN?
My first contributions to MDN were back in 2007, so already some months ago. 🙂 My first contributions were related to German translations to articles, but I also quickly started working on English ones. Some of those contributions were information updates, some of them spelling corrections and I also already started writing a few new articles back then.

How does what you do on MDN affect other parts of your life, and vice versa?
Writing on MDN requires some deeper understanding of web technologies on the one hand, and on the other the writer needs to be able to explain those technologies to other people. So by writing those articles, it helps me to learn about and understand the technologies myself and at the same time it allows me to improve my teaching skills. Having said that, what I’m currently mainly working on and what I was awarded for is more background and cleaning up work.

What advice do you have for new contributors on MDN?
New contributors to MDN should start by doing small changes to or translating existing articles. If they need help, there is already a lot of information on MDN explaining what to do. And if they prefer to ask someone, there’s always a helping hand [via email and IRC].