Worked as a single-person, full-service, catch-all DevRel department, on projects that used my skills across the board: technical writing, content marketing, software development, product management, information architecture, linguistics, graphic design, and video editing.

Documentation overhaul

When I joined the company, the documentation was in the state you’d expect from a startup with a product that had evolved significantly: some of the docs were outdated, some were redundant, and it was generally difficult to find what you needed. My first project was to overhaul the documentation, which involved:

• Rewriting the existing documentation to reflect the current state of the product, with a focus on making the value proposition of the product clear to new users. This was effectively a ground-up rewrite of the existing content.
• Expanded the explanatory content to provide conceptual overviews and context for new and existing users—and to illustrate the product’s value proposition.
• Consolidated reference docs to provide a more cohesive picture of the product.

Documentation management

• Migrated the documentation from a third-party documentation platform provider to a version-controlled, self-managed site which uses Hugo and GitHub Pages.
• Maintained and updated the documentation (often including graphic creation) as new features were released and existing features were improved.
• Customized and extended the docs site’s theme (based on Hugo templating and Tailwind CSS) to support the informational needs of the documentation, including implementation of a snippet system for creating reusable, atomic content blocks.

Product management

• Worked with the engineering team to revamp the information architecture of the product’s data dashboards to provide the context necessary for users to more easily derive actionable insights from their data.
• Wrote the prompts for the product’s LLM-based code review features.

Supporting sales and marketing

• Worked with the marketing team to produce blogs and feature announcements, including a sponsored post in an external publication.
• Collaborated with sales executives to develop the concept, outline, and slide deck for multiple product demos and “thought leadership”-style presentations.
• Recorded and assembled various product demo videos.
• Attended conference (Collision 2023) to represent the company at our booth and host a company-sponsored event.

• Developed an understanding of the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and software supply chain integrity regulatory space.
• Produced an introductory guide to understand Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs).
• Learned so, so much about upcoming software integrity regulations and SBOMs.
• Feel free to ask me why I’ve chosen to redact this company’s name!

• Collaborated with customer reliability engineering and technical support teams to improve and expand existing developer documentation.
• Published several posts for the company blog and oversaw the publication of content produced by members of other teams.
• Learned so, so much about HIPAA and related regulatory regimes.

Major projects

API documentation

• Built an open-source Python library for parsing and editing OpenAPI Specification (OAS) schemas.
• Designed and built a command line tool for adding documentation to bare machine-generated OAS schemas and for merging the API schemas for multiple backend services behind a single API gateway.
• Wrote and managed the API documentation for multiple backend services.

Product demos

• Planned and implemented the tech stack for the DevRel team’s demo presentation strategy.
• Built a custom iPad app for presentations using React Native.
• Managed the entire lifecycle of the iPad-based tech stack and of the app itself.
• This grew from an initial proof of concept with three iPads used by the DevRel team to a dozen iPads spread across teams, including the Sales team and the Customer Solutions team.

External collaboration

• Worked with various prospects to adapt open-source projects to run on Platform.sh.
• These collaborations produced proof-of-concept projects to demonstrate to prospects how they could use the PaaS offerings of Platform.sh to provide a SaaS offering using their projects.

Other duties

• Documentation: Collaborated with other members of the Developer Relations team, Engineering teams, and Product teams to write and review documentation. This included user documentation, blog posts highlighting new features and releases, and tutorials for using the product.
• Conference attendance: Manned sponsored booths at various tech conferences to present the product to prospective customers. After a few conferences, I had my booth pitch down to a tight five minutes that many of my colleagues modeled their own pitches on.
• Managed the team’s Jira projects.
• With the Chief DevRel Officer, interviewed candidates for open positions on the DevRel team.

• Wrote highly-personalized outreach emails to SWE candidates on behalf of clients
• Edited other writers’ emails to ensure consistent output quality
• Developed reusable pitches and blurbs to streamline team-wide writing processes
• Assisted other writers with improving their comprehension of technical and engineering concepts

Worked under the mentorship of Dr. Debra Jared, Professor of Psychology.

• Developed algorithm in Python for quantifying visual similarity of Chinese characters (and presented work at PyCon Canada 2016)
• Designed and implemented process for automated extraction of the most “typical” sentences from a large online corpus for use as sentence stimuli in reading experiment
• Developed set of Python packages to insert gzipped Google Ngrams Simplified Chinese database dumps (several TB uncompressed) into Elasticsearch without needing to store or decompress files locally, resulting in a final size of about 150GB
• Developed self-paced reading experiment from scratch using PsychoPy

• Programmed experiments and statistical analyses for student research projects
• Led a tutorial section comprising reviews of course content, discussion questions, and reviews of recent assignments

Worked under the mentorship of Dr. Eleonora Rossi, Assistant Professor of Linguistics.

As an NSF PIRE 2014 Undergraduate Fellow, designed and implemented a behavioral paradigm to investigate the effects a language learner’s native orthography can have on how the learner encodes novel phonological information; tested subjects at Beijing Normal University in summer 2014 and at Penn State in fall 2014.

• Collaborated with six other developers to implement a complete system overhaul of the internal information system used by tens of thousands of volunteers each year
• Implemented key features such as the medication and medical information tracking system in use during the 46-hour no-sitting, no-sleeping dance marathon weekend
• Volunteered as part of Technology Committee for Penn State Dance Marathon to raise money for pediatric cancer care and research