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Summary: Technical writer, software documentation
I write technical documentation that simplifies complicated software, APIs, and SDKs.
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I code sample applications and implement docs-as-code pipelines.
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I lead teams of technical writers and work directly with development teams.
TriliTech (Remote): 2023-present
  • Senior Technical Writer: 2023-present
Restructuring and clarifying the documentation for the SmartPy, JsLIGO, and CameLIGO programming languages.
Writing and updating tutorials and sample applications in the four programming languages supported by the Tezos platform.
Documenting complex, multi-layered network scenarios for data distribution and token transfer.
Documenting the Tezos SDK for Unity video game development tooling.
Shutterstock (Remote): 2017-2022
  • Staff Information Engineer IV: 2022
  • Senior Information Engineer: 2017-2022
Developer documentation
Developed and wrote documentation for Shutterstock's public API, SDK, CLI, UI widgets, and AI tools by creating a pipeline to merge OpenAPI spec files with manually written examples and task-oriented content.
 
These docs reduced average partner integration time from 3 months to 1.2 months. Partner feedback indicates that documentation is a major factor in getting integrations working quickly.
 
Technical documentation leadership
Drove a culture of information sharing and introduced technical documentation processes as Shutterstock's first technical writer. Hosted writing classes and working sessions to educate development teams about technical docs.
 
Development teams included documentation as part of their development processes. Teams started their own documentation workgroups and provided much of their own docs.
 
Documentation pipeline
Developed and maintained a modular documentation container that builds and publishes documentation for technical teams via GitHub Actions. Coded the container, pipeline, deployment code, and tests using Gatsby, GraphQL, React, GitHub Actions, asynchronous JavaScript, and other open-source tools.
 
Onboarded documentation for 5 internal services onto this system in 2 months and eventually 13 services. This container reduced the time that teams had to spend on tech doc and allowed me to unify internal docs with tools like a global search.
 
Internal technical documentation
Documented internal Node.JS microservices and APIs to promote innersourcing and accelerate onboarding.
 
Teams used this documentation to reduce the amount of time they spent answering consumers' questions, to onboard new developers, and to communicate how to use their systems.
 
IBM (Durham, NC): 2004-2017
  • Advisory Technical Writer/Team Lead: 2012-2017
  • Staff Technical Writer/Team Lead: 2007-2012
  • Technical Writer: 2004-2007
Led a seven-person team providing documentation for IBM UrbanCode software, a suite of enterprise-level continuous delivery, application release automation, and automated cloud provisioning tools. Worked closely with the 70-person development team to provide technically detailed documentation on a continuous-delivery agile production lifecycle.
Provided complete information services for UrbanCode products, including reference docs, live training, videos, white papers, customer forum response, and support response. Covered a wide range of realistic enterprise DevOps scenarios, such as blue-green deployments, rolling deployments, dark launches, continuous delivery, and mainframe deployments.
Documented a wide range of technologies and platforms in Markdown and DITA, including programming languages, distributed software, mainframe software, and cloud systems. Reduced average time to documentation error resolution from 8 days to 2 days.
Researched and wrote custom documents for our largest customers and for critical needs, including videos, white papers, and topology models that were tailored to customers' specific situations. Contributed directly to sales deals in the millions of dollars.
Education
  • M.A. Professional and Technical Writing: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
  • B.A. English Rhetoric and Literature: Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH