About

My Head

I have over 30 years of experience as a Senior Technical Writer, Technical Editor, and Content Strategist, focusing primarily on high-quality, solution-focused documentation and learning content that helps software developers adopt and build applications using new tools and technologies.

I've successfully built and led editorial teams, including 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 coaching the professional growth of my team members, and I have a proven track record of recruiting, training, and retaining excellent writers.

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

Most recently, 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.

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/.)

Past experience includes work with:

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

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