06 / DOCUMENTATION ENGINEERING / PUBLIC CHANGE TRACKER
MemDocs Change Tracker
I created this project when the public MemDocs repository became unavailable. Administrators could still read Microsoft Learn, but the familiar route to inspect edits and contribute corrections was gone. I wanted to keep changes visible, starting with the archive I had preserved before access ended.
MY CONTRIBUTION
Owner and builder: project scope, preservation strategy, comparison workflow, and verification. Built with AI coding assistance.
THE RESULT
An independent public tracker that keeps documentation and media in the familiar MemDocs structure and records observed changes in Git.
MEMDOCS READER
MemDocs Reader makes the tracked changes easier to explore. Search and filter documentation updates by product, platform, or change type, compare changed text, and follow links to the exact changes and current Microsoft Learn articles.
Open MemDocs ReaderTHE PROBLEM
A current article tells you what the guidance says now. It does not necessarily explain what changed since your last visit. My September 2, 2026 archive preserved the earlier public history, but an archive alone could not record later changes. I needed a separate tracker that could follow the published guidance while keeping the original archive intact.
THE DECISIONS
I kept the original commit ancestry and the credits to Microsoft and its contributors. New observations build on that history. The public repository presents articles and media in their existing folders, so readers can browse the documentation and inspect familiar Git diffs.
Scheduled checks compare published Learn pages without using AI. Public navigation and sitemaps help discover new articles and moved pages. A run records documentation changes in a commit labeled “Microsoft Changed Edits” with the observation date. An unchanged check creates no documentation commit. The synchronization engine stays private.
Commit dates identify when the tracker observed a change. They do not reconstruct private Microsoft commits or identify who made an edit. Keeping that distinction visible lets the public history be useful without implying access it does not have.
CURRENT STATE
As of September 29, 2026, the tracker preserves 84,994 original commits and tracks 3,565 articles. Readers can browse the current copies, compare recorded changes, and follow the documentation history from the preserved archive.
This is an unofficial, independent, read-only tracker with no outside contributions. Microsoft and its contributors remain the authors of the source documentation. Daily observations can miss intermediate edits and cannot reveal unpublished files or private authoring history. Published pages also do not reproduce every source-format detail.