Alyssa Rock
Technical Writer
Alyssa Rock
Technical Writer
PDF of resume available on request
About me

I’m a technical writer with 10 years of experience documenting software. I excel at documenting software configuration management systems and writing for DevOps audiences. I can also build and troubleshoot documentation systems that use open source, docs-as-code tech stacks.

  • Title Staff Technical Writer
  • Company VMware
  • Work experience 10 years
  • Taught writing 6 years
  • Residence Springville, UT
  • Location Prefer remote work
Alyssa at a glance
Audiences

I love writing for sys admins, network engineers, and for DevOps, SecOps, and IT.

Technologies

I’m comfortable with UNIX-based systems, Python, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript.

Types of docs

I excel with conceptual docs, procedures, getting started guides, and tutorials. Currently learning API docs.

Companies

I’ve worked for SaltStack (acquired by VMware), Micro Focus, FlexSim Software Products, and Yahoo! Inc.

Testimonials
Alyssa has done so much for improving the documentation at our company. She is detail-oriented, consistent, and one of my favorite people to work with. She's passionate about lowering the barrier to entry in tech through thorough and easy-to-follow documentation, and her work shows that.
Serena Jolley
Serena Jolley
UX Designer at VMware
Not only is Alyssa a very good technical writer, she shows bucket loads of initiative and follow through. She thinks up high value ideas for the project and then follows through on implementing them. She enables and empowers others by helping them refine their ideas where appropriate. She shows leadership where needed. She is good at prioritizing her time, focusing her energy where she can be most impactful. She welcomes feedback and is great at accepting it (which is especially important for tech writers).
Cameron Shorter
Cameron Shorter
Previous chair of the Good Docs Project
Alyssa is highly dependable and I would never hesitate to have her on a project with me. She does much more than most people and she is incredibly impressive in going above and beyond what her job description requires. She has the unique capability of connecting with people and driving forward toward the team goals at the same time, never sacrificing positive culture or team productivity.
Janae Andrus
Janae Andrus
Senior Community Manager at VMware
Working on the Salt Project with Alyssa has been an absolute blast! I’ve had an incredible learning experience, and I owe so much of my progress to her unwavering guidance and mentorship. Whenever I faced any challenges, Alyssa was always available to clear those roadblocks and help me contribute. I have learned so much from Alyssa in these last two years. Aside from her technical writing skills and product knowledge, I admire her ability to connect with people at a very personal level. Alyssa's style of empathetic leadership is something I emulate as I lead my open source working groups. In an ideal world, every open-source project will have an Alyssa to support and guide new contributors.
Gayathri Krishnaswamy
Gayathri Krishnaswamy
Salt Project community contributor
Hobbies and interests
Music omnivore
Film afficionado
Puzzle and game nerd
Food tourist
Success stories

Major installation guide improvements saved time and improved customer satisfaction

The installation guide for our core product at SaltStack received a lot of negative feedback for being difficult to use. It also took several hours to update manually every release cycle. Over 3 months, I collaborated with a team of technical writers and site reliability engineers to overhaul the installation guide. We focused on researching pain points with customers to improve the accuracy and usability of the core content. We also implemented a new theme and automated the CI/CD pipeline for package delivery and publishing. Our improvements had several positive results, including:

  • Average end-user satisfaction scores immediately improved to 3.7 out of 5, up from 2.8 on average in previous surveys.
  • The number of end-users giving the lowest satisfaction score possible dropped to zero.
  • Estimated release cycle time reduction of 56-95 human resource hours. At 3 releases a year, this translates to a time savings of 285 hours annually, freeing up resources for other business initiatives.

 

Migrated 285 knowledge base articles in one month with no data loss

The Support team at SaltStack determined their knowledge base was not meeting internal business requirements and chose a different platform to reduce expenses. The project also needed to be executed quickly before our license expired. Using my previous experience participating in several major migration projects, I helped spearhead and execute a plan to migrate the company’s knowledge base articles to a new cost-saving platform. The results of these efforts were:

  • 285 knowledge base articles were successfully migrated on time without any data loss in only one month.
  • The new platform not only saved costs, but integrated well with existing support team processes.
  • The Support team sponsored me for recognition as the “Saltiest Employee of the Month.”