I started using MDN because it always showed up when searching for any web feature. It stood out to me as simplistic, professional, and complete, and I figured that I could find anything with an in-site search without ever leaving MDN.
Contributor profile
@Josh-CenaHello! I'm Joshua Chen from Shanghai, currently based in New Haven, United States. I joined the MDN team 2 years ago as an invited expert for JavaScript documentation. Since then, I've been in charge of reviewing or creating almost all significant JavaScript content changes, including bringing everything up to date, creating the regular expressions reference, and championing the documentation of all new features in the past two years. I've also expanded my focus a bit beyond my committed area, and you may see me triaging content issues, reviewing PRs in other areas, and fixing content bugs.
If you are a JavaScript developer, you may also know a few other projects I work on: I'm also a member of the Docusaurus and typescript-eslint teams. My work experience across the JavaScript ecosystem, especially in tooling, has given me unique insights and perspectives about the language itself.
As a university student, when I'm not writing code or documentation, I'm busy studying data science and linguistics. I'm equally fascinated by programming languages and natural languages, and I want to understand more about how humans generate and perceive language, both spoken and written.
Joshua Chen
MDN is the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and professional documentation about the web. This is all thanks to its diverse writer team as well as a strong contributor community, who have consistently demonstrated expertise in every area.
How did you start using MDN?
What do you like about the website?
I like its vast span of content in terms of style, breadth, and depth. It features everything from learning materials for absolute beginners to cleanly organized guides and examples to comprehensive references that document every part of the web and every pedantic detail of it. Different authors bring different elements of style, perspective, and experience to each page, so it can benefit audiences of all backgrounds and in all situations.
Why do you contribute to Open Source or MDN?
I am closely involved with the JavaScript language (as mentioned, I work a lot on JavaScript tooling), and as a reader, I sometimes I find bits of information that are outdated or incomplete. I believe my expertise in this area can benefit MDN. It also happens that MDN is open-source on GitHub, and I'm a huge fan of open, collaborative docs (whether GitHub-based or wiki-based).
What do you enjoy about contributing to MDN?
I enjoy the attention to tooling. MDN has one of the best infrastructure setups for aiding contributions—from numerous CI checks, to automatic PR/issue labeling, to the Yari flaw dashboard, to details such as the bot leaving a comment when a PR has merge conflicts. These pieces of infrastructure ensure that maintainers spend less time doing chores and contributors of various skill levels can contribute to MDN seamlessly.
There are many other things I like about MDN: the openness of its governance, the respect for contributors' work, the professional conversations, and the always timely reviews. MDN has consistently demonstrated the ideal form of an open-source project.