About

My Head

I've have been fortunate over the last 30+ years to collaborate with many amazing teams as a Senior Technical Writer, Editor, and Content Strategist in the software industry. I've worked across the spectrum of content from consumer end-user help to open-source code API docs to DevRel and content marketing.

Mostly my work focuses on documentation, learning, and go-to-market content that helps software developers, data scientists, and other technical users adopt and succeed with new tools and technologies.

I've successfully built and led editorial teams, from recruiting, training, and retaining writers and editors to creating internal editorial policies and best practices, developing content strategy and education design, and setting up tooling for efficient content creation and publishing. I’m passionate about collaborating with and coaching the professional growth of my team members.

A unique aspect of my career path has been working across many technical content disciplines, from end user guides to API reference documentation, developer education, and technical content marketing. I approach these different types content as facets of a holistic developer engagement strategy and I have a deep understanding of how to create content that is technically accurate and both useful and engaging to developers.

I focus on understanding users' critical “jobs to be done,” then creating content that guides them through “Aha!” moments along the learning path, engaging them with new products, and helping them get their work done better and faster.

I'm currently Senior Technical Writer and documentation team lead at Game Data Pros, focused on personalization and revenue optimization tools for game publishers.

Past experience includes work with:

I've written for O'Reilly, Application Development Trends, and Redmond Magazine.

In a previous role, I was Senior Technical Writer at Prefect.io, writing, designing, and publishing user guides, tutorials, and API documentation for the Prefect open-source Python dataflow orchestration engine and Prefect Cloud service. Here's an example of the kind of feedback I strive to earn through quality documentation experiences for new users:

During the first few days with @PrefectIO, my impressions:

- very well-documented platform.
- Few dependencies compared to Airflow.
- I was able to migrate a few days in a few hours...

So far, so good; I can't complain.

— Espoir Murhabazi (@esp_py) February 22, 2023

(Note: the last open source release I worked on at Prefect was 2.8.4. Documentation for this release is hosted for posterity at https://prefect-284-docs.netlify.app/.)

See my LinkedIn profile for further details about my professional experience.

Writing Portfolio

Some examples of my writing:

"CSS Basics: The Box Model, Margin, and Padding", a CSS3 tutorial.

"Teaching Programming with Human Functions", a blog post I wrote about my experience creating curriculum for and teaching programming to 4th grade students.

"Writing About Code: Structure", an article based on a Vermont Code Camp presentation on writing techniques for technical authors. This is an approach to technical writing I still use today.

TapUtils is a set of command line utilities I wrote as a companion piece to an iOS application for capturing craft beer ratings. The app is gone now, but I took documenting the apps as seriously as I would any other project.

Web Page Size, Speed, and Performance, a book published by O’Reilly.

I also contributed to the Visual Studio Magazine "Toolbox" column for many years. Here are a few examples of my column:

Community

It's been my experience that, if you want to see change in your community, you need to roll up your sleeves and make the change happen. To that end, I've tried to be active in making change in both my local community and within my profession. These efforts include:

Find me online

You can find me on the following social networks:

Links

Social