PSA: Cache your prettier writes
If you’re using Prettier in your projects, you might benefit from caching that’s been introduced since version 2.7 (June 2022). Let’s have a look at how it works and how much faster it runs.- 3 min read
Posts tagged MDN
My experience working full-time as a technical writer on the MDN Web Docs team to ensure the content is up to date, helpful, and inspiring.
Using BCD to spot missing MDN Web Docs gaps
I built a small proof-of-concept page that lists BCD features without MDN Web Docs pages. I deployed it at bcd.bsmth.de/ so you can have a look and see if you want to fill gaps in web documentation with us. It’s far from stable and may change at any point, but this post describes how it works and why I built it.- 4 min read
2024: MDN HTTP content, GitHub, Firefox
It’s that time of the year again - 2024 is coming to a close wrapped. Let’s look at what I did over the last year on GitHub. I’ll share some stats that I collected from my work, visualize the data to understand it a little more, and show the categories and types of work I focused on.- 7 min read
Intl.Segmenter for l10n in JavaScript
Earlier this year, JavaScript Intl.Segmenter gained support in all three major browser engines, meaning it’s achieved Baseline status of “newly available”. Now, your applications can natively retrieve meaningful information from strings in a variety of locales in the latest browsers.- 6 min read
New exclusive accordions in HTML
Giving the same name to a group of <details> elements makes them behave like exclusive accordions. This is good news for developers who have been writing custom accordions from scratch because it’s soon supported across all major browsers. Let’s explore what this means with some quick examples.- 5 min read
New JavaScript Set methods
There’s some fresh JavaScript Set features that have just achieved cross-browser support, so let’s have a look at what they can do. Read on if you’re new to Set in JavaScript and you’re curious how to use these new JavaScript methods. I’ll highlight some advantages with basic examples to show why you might reach for these instead of building your own implementations.- 13 min read
Page Visibility API usage & hints
Checking document visibility gives you insight into how visitors are interacting with your pages and can provide hints about the status of your applications. This post takes a look at what page visibility is, how you can use the Page Visibility API in your websites, and describes pitfalls to avoid if you build features around this functionality.- 7 min read
2023: GitHub, Interop, 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
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.- 1 min read
Learn grep for powerful code search
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.- 1 min read
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.- 2 min read
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.- 3 min read
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