I have been writing and producing technical documentation for over twenty years with seven years’ experience writing and publishing web-based materials, four years’ experience designing, building, and launching web sites, and five years’ experience in management.

Career Goal

A writing, manager, or managing editor position where I can use my technical, writing, team, and web skills to produce world-class and audience-focused publications.

Skills Summary

Work History

Sun Microsystems, Inc.
8/95 to present

Global Web Publishing (7/07 - present): Production Manager responsible for leading a distributed team of 10 production leads for www.sun.com/software, www.sun.com/services, and developers.sun.com. Responsibilities include day-to-day management, employee development, resourcing high-profile projects and product launches, managing stakeholder relationships, and overseeing the sites. Also wrote articles for publication to developers.sun.com on various technical topics.

Client Systems Group (11/03 - 7/07): Technical Publications Manager responsible for managing and mentoring a globalized staff of 16 that produced 100 - 150 documents per year to cover five product lines for wireless, smart card, and content delivery technologies. Responsibilities included day-to-day management, employee development, and the team intranet. I designed, built, and wrote much of the content for the team intranet. Led a project to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and set quality standards by streamlining the internal production processes.

Software Developer Outreach (8/97 - 11/03): Program Manager responsible for the design, development, and launch of developer web sites and competitive intelligence intranet. Responsibilities also included writing technically-focused launch articles to announce the new sites.

Senior Technical Writer responsible for the research, design, and writing of articles, tutorials, and quizzes covering all aspects of the Java platform published to the developer web sites. Organized the article, tutorial, and quiz pages; participated in site redesigns, designed and implemented interactive content, and created and implemented a reader survey. I designed, created, and tested my own code samples.

Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc., (8/95 - 8/97): Senior Technical Writer responsible for the research, design, and writing of the Developer’s Guide for the Trusted Solaris application programming interfaces (APIs). This guide contains security policy information, describes the Trusted Solaris APIs, and provides annotated code examples. I designed, created, and tested most of the code samples. Also wrote a C program and later converted it to a sed and awk script to process data in two text files for display on man pages. Edited the Makefile to generate each man page from the processed data and templates so the man pages always contain the most up-to-date data from the text files.

Taligent, Inc.
11/92 to 8/95

Senior Technical Writer responsible for the research, design, and writing of the programming manual for the 2D and 3D object-oriented graphics system. The graphics system is an extensive collection of C++ classes. The manual describes the full-scale feature set, the classes in the system, the system architecture, and how to effectively program. This manual contains conceptual information, numerous illustrations, and annotated code examples. I designed, created, and tested most of the code samples.

Also wrote the documentation for the GrafEdit framework, which is a skeleton program for creating drawing programs. The framework provides basic, commonly used functionality found in most drawing programs to save coding time. The programmer adds his or her program-specific functionality (such as menus, menu items, and associated command actions).

Cooperative Solutions, Inc.
7/90 to 11/92

Senior Technical Writer responsible for writing an 800-page reference manual and on-line help for the Ellipse product. Ellipse is a development tool for designing and building on-line transaction processing applications where data is stored in a database on a server and accessed over the net by the clients. Also participated in Ellipse product design, submitted proposals to improve how on-line help and error messages are handled in the product, and designed a documentation set for the Ellipse product. I used my knowledge of C programming to create my own tools to assist me in managing the on-line help facility. Also created Volume II from 800-page manual to focus on coding procedures, data manipulation statements, and transaction back out logic. Trained contract writers to handle Volume I. Total pages: 1350.

Hewlett-Packard
9/87 to 7/90

Senior Technical Writer responsible for the HP Sockets Administrator’s Manual. The software interface translates programs running on one machine in one language to another language and another machine. For example, translate a Pascal program running on an HP9000 to a C program running on an HP3000. Also wrote the user's manual for HP Interactive Visual Interface software. This is an HP X Widgets and X Tool kit-based software package that lets users interactively create an object-oriented visual interface and connect that interface to a C application program. Also wrote the self-paced tutorial covering how to create a visual interface and how to write a C program to activate the interface.

Also wrote the HP Real-Time Database User's Manual and self-paced tutorial under very tight time constraints. Both documents covered the design and creation of a real-time database in the C programming language. The system also had an SQL-like (Structured Query Language) interactive interface. Wrote application note for FORTRAN programmers to create an HP Real-Time database.

Network Equipment Technologies, Inc.
4/86 to 9/87

Technical writer responsible for the 700-page Operator's Guide for Integrated Digital Network Exchange (IDNX) series equipment (advanced voice, data, and video analog/digital telecommunications system that enables large companies to build and manage private utility networks). The Operator's Guide included software diagnostics and briefly covered system hardware. Also participated in the development of the documentation set to cover the full range of company products.

Synapse/Broderbund
5/83 to 2/87

Created booklets and documentation for the following products for Atari and Commodore computers: