Web platform docs by @bsmth

I'm a Staff Technical Writer on the MDN Web Docs team at Mozilla.
I write about JavaScript, CSS, APIs, the web platform, and open source software.

Blog posts:

2023 Wrapped: MDN GitHub maintenance, Interop '23 & Firefox release notes.

Now that 2023 is coming to a close wrapped, I thought I’d take a look back at what I managed to achieve over the year. I joined Mozilla in 2022 as a Staff Technical Writer on the MDN team, which made 2023 the first full year that I focused entirely on MDN Web Docs. In this post, I’ll share some stats that I collected from my work on GitHub, visualize the data to understand it a little more, and show the categories I focused on.

- 5 min read

MDN Blog: JavaScript console methods

Earlier in the year, I wrote about using grep on the MDN Blog for code search under the “developer essential” category. I categorize it this way because I think it will give people unfamiliar with grep a massive productivity boost and exposure to skills like working on the command line and regular expressions. This looks like it’s becoming a series of posts on “essentials” (or what I think are incredibly beneficial skills, at least) for working effectively as a web developer.

- 2 min read

MDN Blog: How to search code using grep

A big part of web development extends beyond the usual suspects of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and HTTP. You need to glue these building blocks together, and for that, you need to be able to use tools, systems, and other fundamentals.

- 2 min read

MDN Blog: CSS hues with hsl()

After deep-diving into color functions like lab(), lch() and color(), I realized that hue was actually a great topic to update across MDN Web Docs. I am pretty happy with the outcome and there was a lot of interesting findings, updated pages, and new examples that should help beginners get started using hues in CSS.

- 1 min read

MDN Blog: JavaScript regular expressions reference docs

The JavaScript regular expressions (regex) documentation had a big update recently thanks to the efforts of Joshua Chen. Josh did the heavy lifting, and I was glad to give some feedback and reviews to land the changes. There are new, dedicated pages for each JS language feature for regular expressions, with information about the syntax and browser compat data, too.

- 2 min read

MDN Blog: CSS color functions and color spaces

In March of this year, I was assigned a Firefox 111 release task to document lab(), lch() and color() functions that were shipping in the stable release. This was an interesting one for me to work on and I learned a lot of new things about color spaces, color science, and plenty about color in CSS.

- 2 min read

Discover Stable Diffusion, GitHub trending, WebKit's move to GitHub

GitHub made a surprise announcement this week that the trending repositories page was going away. This page highlights projects on GitHub that are receiving the most amount of stars and contributions within a certain time period and was a popular way to discover interesting repositories. The trending repositories page briefly held a banner announcing the change would come into effect at the end of the month.

- 3 min read

Migrating from Google Analytics to Netlify Analytics

I decided to make the change recently to try out Netlify Analytics in place of Google Analytics. I was initially motivated to improve my website’s performance and eliminate trackers, but I’m also curious about how it is from the maintainer side. In this post, I’ll describe my motivations, what I did to get started, my initial impressions, and things I learned along the way.

- 6 min read

Discover Copilot, Pokedex, InterviewThis

I’m happy to share some projects and highlights from the dev community that I found interesting. We’ll take a look at an awesome example Android app, how to use the :has() CSS selector, technical interview questions to ask a prospective employer, and a great read about battling GitHub’s copilot.

- 2 min read

Deploying websites using Jekyll, AWS Amplify and GitHub actions

For my current stack, I’m using Jekyll to build static pages, AWS Amplify for deployments, and GitHub actions to pick up broken HTML. This entire setup is designed to be as low-maintenance as possible while remaining customizable and configurable. There’s a few benefits of using Amplify instead of GitHub pages:

- 5 min read

How I revived my audio interface after Big Sur update

The TAC-2R is a desktop audio interface made by Zoom (not the video Zoom, the audio equipment Zoom) for turning analog signals from microphones, guitars, drum machines or synthesizers into digital inputs for audio software to record / stream. It also performs the opposite and provides high-quality audio output from your computer to external speakers and monitors.

- 3 min read