McrFRED Round 7 Chris Mills on the Importance of Documentation

McrFRED Round 7 is confirmed for Thursday 26th September, 6.30pm.

At the usual TechHub Manchester.

If you read technical and web related books, chances are you've read something that Chris Mills has been involved with.

In the 'dotcom' boom, a lot happened in a relatively short amount of time with regards to advances in technology specifications, software development and pioneering new techniques. In truth, it hasn't really slowed down all that much.

At the start of this boom, the alpha developers leading the fight for web standards were often in the same circles, with vast amounts of useful information passing around via emails and blog posts. If you knew where to look, you could find answers.

Around this time, Chris got heavily into documenting the web, working for publishers like Wrox, glasshaus and friends of ED, and participating in grassroots education initiatives like the WaSP InterACT curriculum and the web standards curriculum. Around this time he got in touch with people he saw doing cool stuff and encouraged them to get books published, including many who went on to become big names and do great things.

JavaScript

Having just finished a 6 year stint at Opera doing evangelism, education and https://dev.opera.com, he's recently landed a job working for Mozilla, writing about open web apps on MDN https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/. He is also one of the key folk who started up the W3C's webplatform.org ~~/webplatform.github.io/docs/wiki/Main_Page~~ (no longer online) project. He don't know much about history, but he knows a thing or two about writing documentation.

JavaScript

For me, especially when starting to learn something new, good documentation makes the world of difference. I'm looking forward to hearing Chris talk about effective documentation, teaching, publishing horror stories and building communities — and seeing what he comes dressed as https://vimeo.com/41487125!