Summary

Technical content expert and educator driving developer education strategy, execution, and growth.

Professional Experience

Director of Developer Education - March 2022 - Present

Temporal Technologies (Remote)

• Pioneered Temporal’s Education function, crafting a comprehensive, hands-on competency-based curriculum for developer skill advancement in Temporal products, resulting in a consistent increase in new named users monthly.
• Owned the strategy, information architecture, production, growth, and maintenance of documentation for Temporal’s products and SDKs, collaborating with engineers and product managers as content creators.
• Developed a live training program for enterprise customers and a partner certification program, leading to successful expansion and client engagement in enterprise accounts.
• Oversaw the incorporation of LLM tools into documentation and content development workflows, enhancing resource efficiency and content quality.
• Supported the growth and performance of a fully-remote technical content team that delivered product documentation, tutorials, and on-demand courses in multiple programming languages.

Developmental Editor and Author — August 2010 - Present

The Pragmatic Bookshelf

• Wrote 11 technical books including Build Websites with Hugo, Small, Sharp Software Tools, tmux 2: Productive Mouse-Free Development, and Exercises For Programmers.
• Edited 19 technical books including Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up, Powerful Command Line Applications in Go, and Fire In The Valley, 3rd Edition.
• Maintained and enhanced the proprietary toolchain that produces print, PDF, and Ebooks of all Pragmatic Bookshelf titles from 2016 to 2022.

Senior Manager, Technical Editing, DigitalOcean Community — March 2021 - March 2022

Manager, Technical Editing, DigitalOcean Community — September 2018 - March 2021

Senior Technical Editor, DigitalOcean Community — June 2016 - September 2019

DigitalOcean (Remote)

• Established and led a high-performing distributed team of technical editors that produced hundreds of quality tutorials for millions of developers. This significantly boosted awareness and adoption of DigitalOcean’s products, contributing to revenue growth year over year.
• Managed the Write for DOnations program, handling budgets and facilitating author payments and donations, aligning with corporate social responsibility goals.
• Oversaw the successful integration of two major content acquisitions, adding over 1000 new pieces to the library, resulting in increased traffic, conversions, and brand awareness.
• Implemented data-informed goals for content publishing, consistently increasing output, website traffic, and revenue for three consecutive years.
• Developed and executed professional growth plans for team members, achieving successful promotions and transitions, including individual contributors advancing to managerial roles.
• As an individual contributor, critically reviewed, tested, and published expert articles through the Write for DOnations program, built automated workflows to streamline the technical testing of tutorials on various server environments, and launched the first set of interactive tutorials with in-browser command-line interfaces.

Software Development Instructor — August 2012 - June 2016

Chippewa Valley Technical College - Eau Claire, Wisconsin

• Developed and delivered a comprehensive curriculum in web development, Linux usage, programming fundamentals, and agile concepts, successfully teaching over 500 students through online and in-person courses over four years.
• Repeatedly nominated for teaching excellence awards (2012, 2014, 2015), consistently achieving high scores in student evaluations.
• Led well-received annual inservice sessions on teaching methods from 2012 to 2015.

Web Application Developer and System Administrator — January 2003 - August 2012

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

• Used PHP, Ruby on Rails, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL to build robust systems to manage student registration for field experience programs, parking services, and an emergency alert system using SMS messaging.
• Managed systems for public web servers, application servers, and database servers running both Windows and Linux, handling almost one million visits per month.

Skills

• People: People management, mentoring, teaching, coaching, public speaking, technical writing, developmental editing, community engagement, educational content creation and delivery, adult education, teaching methods.
• Software Development: Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Elixir, HTML, CSS, Sass, Bash, SQL, MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Temporal, responsive design, accessibility, test-driven development.
• Tools: Vim, tmux, Git, Apache, Nginx, Vagrant. Terraform, Ansible, Docker, JIRA, Confluence, Google Docs, Full Story, Google Search Console, Notion, Docusaurus, Hugo.

Volunteer Work

• Vets Who Code - Content advisor - August 2020-Present
• The Collab Lab - Career Mentor - January 2021-June 2024

Recent Publications

• Build Websites with Hugo - The Pragmatic Bookshelf - 2020
• Small, Sharp Software Tools - The Pragmatic Bookshelf - 2019
• tmux 2: Productive Mouse-Free Development - The Pragmatic Bookshelf - 2017

Software Projects

• node-livereload, a library with over 100K downloads per week that hundreds of projects rely on to reload web pages when files change.
• Codecaster, a software development teaching environment to support adult learners in the classroom.
• Other Open-source projects: https://github.com/napcs

Education

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Eau Claire, WI

• BBA (Information Systems Management)