At the just-finished JSConf.eu (European JavaScript Conference), Mozilla sponsored the Hacker Lounge, and held a doc sprint during the conference.

The conference kicked off with Bella Morningstar, president of the Brendan Eich Fan Club (a.k.a. Mandy Lauderdale), serenading Brendan:

JSConf.eu opening song – JavaScript Will Listen from Alexander Lang on Vimeo.

Later, at Brendan’s request, he received a hand-crafted “Mandy Fan Club” t-shirt. That t-shirt, in turn, was auctioned at the end of the conference to support the wonderful work of Coder Dojo, led by James Whelton, which teaches programming skills to kids in Ireland. Holger Blank won the auction on behalf of JSConf.eu, donating 1500 euros to Coder Dojo.

For the doc sprint, the Hacker Lounge turned out to be less than ideal for concentrated work, thanks to the digital foosball table, but the sprinters found plenty of places to sit and work in Alte Münze, which was an amazing conference venue.

Here’s what the sprinters at JSConf.eu accomplished:

• David Bruant fixed up freeze(), forEach(), watch(), DOM event, and Node.textContent; fixed the example in element.addEventListener(); added a bunch of events to the DOM event reference page with info from Philip Tellis; created a page for the error event.
• Colby Russell reviewed and improved the Array and String pages, removing the NeedsTechnicalReview tags.
• Burak Yiğit Kaya reviewed, fixed up and removed the NeedsTechnicalReview tag from this, DOM storage, the Function constructor, encodeURI(), and regular expressions.
• Louis-Rémi Babé documented usage of cross-origin images with Canvas.
• After joining MDN during the conference, Paul Campbell reviewed and edited the RegExp page. Thanks for pitching in!

We also had remote contributions:

• Jean-Yves Perrier updated and added examples to a bunch of pages for CSS data types (such as <angle>, <ratio>, and so on).
• Jonathan Willson added browser compatibility tables and info to several DOM properties.
• Kevin Lim continued to improve the IndexedDB docs.
• yyss translated Animating objects with WebGL into Japanese.
• Berker Peksag fixed the code example and added a browser compatibility table to event.button and added an example to element.scrollLeft.

We also had moral support from Tom Schuster, Neil Rashbrook, Jeff Griffiths (who also helped Franz Enzenhofer isolate a possible Canvas bug in Firefox), Chris Heilmann, and Dietrich Ayala. Thanks!

Big thanks to Jared Wyles for mentioning the doc sprint during his talk. I’ll hold him to his request for peer pressure to work on open source!

Thanks also to Holger Blank and the rest of the JSConf organizers for putting on an excellent conference, and accommodating Mozilla’s ticket purchase requests.

And thanks finally to Chris Williams for suggesting that we hold the sprint during the conference, and for mentioning it in his inspiring closing keynote. One of the points he made during that keynote is that releasing software as open source is like baring a little piece of your soul. This conference reminded me yet again what an honor it is for me to work together with the thousands of people who pour little bits of their souls into the Mozilla project to create open source software and documentation to keep the Web open for everyone.