Alyssa Rock
Technical Writer
Alyssa Rock
Technical Writer
Resume
Work experience
Staff Technical Writer
2019-present
Staff Technical Writer
VMware (also SaltStack Inc., acquired by VMware)
  • Collaborated across teams to make major improvements to my product’s installation guide, immediately improving average customer satisfaction scores to 3.7 out of 5, up from 2.8.
  • Recognized as Employee of the Month for planning and coordinating a migration of the company’s 285 knowledge base articles to a cost-saving platform in one month without data loss.
  • Worked with stakeholders to create the Salt Docs Roadmap to track major documentation epics and communicate their status to the community, which has been received positively by the Salt Project community and project leads.
  • Created employee study group to break down silos and help new employees learn more about our core products; 25% of employees attended on average every week.
Technical Writer
2014-2019
Technical Writer
FlexSim Software Products
  • Collaborated with developers to redesign user manual for manufacturing simulation software; received highly positive feedback from multiple customers and project leads for the improvements.
  • Created full user manual for health-care simulation software in only 2 months; received high praise from all project leads.
  • Researched industry standards and wrote comprehensive company style guide to help employees communicate to customers clearly and consistently in technical documentation.
Lecturer
2008-2014
Lecturer
Utah Valley University
  • Taught courses in technical writing and introductory research/writing.
  • Developed 400+ page course textbook to scaffold in-class instruction and reduce textbook costs for students by 50%; textbook regularly received highly positive feedback from students.
Technical Writer
2006-2008
Technical Writer
Yahoo! Inc.
  • Created user guides for more than 40 internal tools; consistently met project timetables and received positive feedback.
  • Designed web-based video tutorial to instruct Yahoo employees how to use new internal tool; involved creating original script, graphics and music; received outstanding recognition from executive sponsors.
Education
Master of Arts in English
2003-2005
Master of Arts in English
University of Utah

English, American Studies with an emphasis in Film

Skills
Tools
  • Markdown, rST, Sphinx
  • CI/CD, linting, and other docs-as-code tools
  • Git, GitHub, GitLab
  • UNIX systems
  • DITA, Oxygen XML, SDL Tridion
  • HTML/CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • Confluence
  • Photoshop and Illustrator
  • JIRA
Community service
Community manager
2020-present
Community manager
The Good Docs Project
  • Manages a rapidly growing open-source community of 50+ technical writers and developers dedicated to improving documentation in open source by providing high-quality templates and other guidance to open-source developers.
  • Lead a user research project to gather data from 33 technical writers and then collaborated with project stakeholders to turn the insights into the project’s product roadmap.
  • Successfully co-lead a 3-month project to migrate our project from GitHub to GitLab with no data loss or interruptions to the project’s work.
Staff, Meetup Program Coordinator
2020-2023
Staff, Meetup Program Coordinator
Write the Docs Quorum

Write the Docs (WTD) is a volunteer-based global community of people who care about documentation. In 2020, I created and led the WTD Quorum program, which provides quarterly online education meetups and social networking events for more than 1,000 technical writers in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.