Recent writing samples
API documentation presentation
In May of 2024, I presented a talk on Web API Documentation & OpenAPI for the local chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. It included an interactive demonstration, in which attendees used cURL commands to send requests to an API server. I'm a huge believer in hands-on learning. You can read many pages about a topic, but it's when you do something with it that you truly start to understand it.
Find out more about that talk here:
Instructional coding samples
View dozens of CodePens I created to help students learn to code.
About this site + other sites
All pages on this website are entirely hand-coded by me with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with dashes of TailwindCSS and Bootstrap. I deploy the site via Netlify and GitHub.
Here's the source code on GitHub.
I've spun up other sites using a handful of other technologies like Jamstack SSGs, headless CMSs, Sphinx, Vercel, and GitHub Pages, just to learn how they work:
On technical writing
Read my technical writing book reviews.
Why I write docs
I love words, and I love tech. I have a degree in Applied Linguistics, and I've been writing code for decades. Writing technical documentation suits my personality incredibly well. I'm highly detail-oriented and a teacher by nature, the kind of person who always wants to explain things to others; by writing docs, I get to do it productively instead of being annoying ;)
I love teaching because I love learning. I love getting new concepts and figuring things out. Manuals and documentation sites have been my lifelong friends in learning endeavors. By contributing to docs, I feel like I'm giving something tangible back.
I often think about this: As a species, where would we be if we didn't document what we know so that others can learn from it?
Skills (I can...)
- Create new software documentation (developer documentation preferred)
- Audit and improve existing documentation: content, structure, tooling, processes
- Conduct subject matter expert (SME) interviews to discover and verify content
- Produce training materials, such as workshops, exercises, and quizzes
- Draft custom docs style guides and templates
- Plan and manage complex projects, including coordinating others
- Work in a dev environment with code, code editors, CLIs, etc
- Conduct thorough user testing
- Write and debug code snippets
- Understand accessibility, inclusivity, UI/UX, and SEO concerns
- Work cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux)
- Learn new tech quickly
Tech proficiencies
- API and SDK documentation, OpenAPI 3+
- Vale prose linter and other docs-as-code tools
- General web development, DevOps, and cloud platforms
- JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Node.js, Python, SQL
- CSS and JS frameworks such as Bootstrap, TailwindCSS, React, React Native, NextJS
- Docs platforms such as Fern, Mintlify, GitBook, Sphinx, ReadMe, Docusaurus, and others
- Headless and traditional content management systems (CMSs)
- Static site generators (SSGs) such as Astro.js, Hugo, Eleventy
- git, GitHub, GitHub Actions
- Markup languages for writing content such as Markdown and ReStructuredText
- JSON, YAML, and other configuration and data serialization formats
- Basic Docker and Kubernetes
Contact