My Contribution to Doka

Today we launched Doka, an online encyclopedia about web development, written in clear and caring language. Doka is in Russian, our goal is to make learning and teaching web development easier and simpler for whole Russian-speaking community.

Doka is open source. This means that anyone who wants to fix a typo or write a new article can open a pull request in the project repository, and our editorial staff will help with publishing the material.

In this post, I want to share my story of how I got involved in the project, what I did there, and what I do for the project now.

How I Got Involved

I joined the team in April 2020. By that time, some of the articles had already been written. Most of the articles were small materials—we now call them docs.

I helped with the docs for a while, but I soon realized that I liked longer and more detailed materials—we now call them articles. After a couple of docs, I switched to writing articles…—and it just got going.

What I Wrote

I mostly worked on JavaScript topics. There were already authors on HTML and CSS, and my last few articles on my blog were also mostly about JS, so it seemed like a reasonable idea.

In all the time I’ve been an author, I’ve managed to write over 30 articles. Here’s the list of main topics I wrote articles on:

  • Language and browser environment;
  • Common tasks frontend developers deal with (loading on data scroll, throttle and debounce etc);
  • General terms in programming (recursion, API etc);
  • How web applications work (overview, security, protocols, REST, SOAP etc);
  • Programming paradigms (overview, OOP, FP, other paradigms);
  • Soft skills and work in a team (tech debt, ode code style etc);
  • Testing (unit, integration, and E2E testing, TDD, simplifying tests and infrastructure);
  • Architecture and software design (design patterns, MVC, onion, hexagon, clean architecture, data flow, etc).

What I Do Now

Now I’ve moved away from writing and switched to reviewing new materials. I’ve gone into editing, so to speak 😃

We don’t want Doka to be developed by a dozen people, but by the whole community. That’s why we decided to restructure our processes and throw our energies into editing and checking pull requests.

Plans for Future

Doka has plans not only for HTML, CSS and JS, but also for other sections: SVG, accessibility, and maybe we will go beyond just the web. All in all, I expect it to be interesting!

If you now Russian and you’ve got an idea for a doc or an article, or if you’d like to help us close existing placeholders—write to us! Meet us at pull requests on GitHub 👋