By now, most folks have heard about Mozilla’s recent layoff of about 250 of its employees. It’s also fairly well known that the entire MDN Web Docs content team was let go, aside from our direct manager, the eminently-qualified and truly excellent Chris Mills. That, sadly, includes myself.
Yes, after nearly 14½ years writing web developer documentation for MDN, I am moving on to new things. I don’t know yet what those new things are, but the options are plentiful and I’m certain I’ll land somewhere great soon.
Winding down
But it’s weird. I’ve spent over half my career as a technical writer at Mozilla. When I started, we were near the end of documenting Firefox 1.5, whose feature features (sorry) were the exciting new <canvas> element and CSS improvements including CSS columns. A couple of weeks ago, I finished writing my portions of the documentation for Firefox 40, for which I wrote about changes to WebRTC and Web Audio, as well as the Media Source API.
Indeed, in my winding-down days, when I’m no longer assigned specific work to do, I find myself furiously writing as much new material as I can for the WebRTC documentation, because I think it’s important, and there are just enough holes in the docs as it stands to make life frustrating for newcomers to the technology. I won’t be able to fix them all before I’m gone, but I’ll do what I can.
Because that’s how I roll. I love writing developer documentation, especially for technologies for which no documentation yet exists. It’s what I do. Digging into a technology and coding and debugging and re-coding (and cursing and swearing a bit, perhaps) until I have working code that ensures that I understand what I’m going to write about is a blast! Using that code, and what I learned while creating it, to create documentation to help developers avoid at least some of the debugging (and cursing and swearing a bit, perhaps) that I had to go through.
The thrill of creation is only outweighed by the deep-down satisfaction that comes from knowing that what you’ve produced will help others do what they need to do faster, more efficiently, and—possibly most importantly—better.
That’s the dream.
Wrapping up
Anyway, I will miss Mozilla terribly; it was a truly wonderful place to work. I’ll miss working on MDN content every day; it was my life from the day I joined as the sole full-time writer, through the hiring and departure of several other writers, until the end.
First, let me thank the volunteer community of writers, editors, and translators who’ve worked on MDN in the past—and who I hope will continue to do so going forward. We need you more than ever now!
Me, if I’ve forgotten to mention anyone.
Then there are our staff writers, both past and present. Jean-Yves Perrier left the team a long while ago, but he was a fantastic colleague and a great guy. Jérémie Pattonier was a blast to work with and a great asset to our team. Paul Rouget, too, was a great contributor and a great person to work with (until he moved on to engineering roles; then he became a great person to get key information from, because he was so easy to engage with).
Chris Mills, our amazing documentation team manager and fabulous writer in his own right, will be remaining at Mozilla, and hopefully will find ways to make MDN stay on top of the heap. I’m rooting for you, Chris!
Florian Scholz, our content lead and the youngest member of our team (a combination that tells you how amazing he is) was a fantastic contributor from his school days onward, and I was thrilled to have him join our staff. I’m exceptionally proud of his success at MDN.
Janet Swisher, who managed our community as well as writing documentation, may have been the rock of our team. She’s been a steadfast and reliable colleague and a fantastic source of advice and ideas. She kept us on track a lot of times when we could have veered sharply off the rails and over a cliff.
Will Bamberg has never been afraid to take on a big project. From developer tools to browser extensions to designing our new documentation platform, I’ve always been amazed by his focus and his ability to do big things well.
Thank you all for the hard work, the brilliant ideas, and the devotion to making the web better by teaching developers to create better sites. We made the world a little better for everyone in it, and I’m very, very proud of all of us.
Farewell, my friends.
