Alyssa Rock - Resumé

Work experience

Broadcom

2019 - present

Technical Writer 4

Writes and edits product documentation for open source and commercial software products for DevOps professionals. Responsibilities include:

  • Collaborating with three development teams to produce effective documentation that is always delivered on time and reduces or resolves support requests.
  • Coaching engineers and open source community members to create documentation that is useful and well-organized.
  • Developing documentation quality benchmarks and reviewing new documentation contributions to ensure they meet those standards.
  • Setting up and maintaining end-to-end documentation tooling systems for docs-as-code systems.
  • Conducting user research and reviewing documentation to identify strategic initiatives to improve the documentation.
  • Acting as a crucial communication bridge to break down silos between product, UX, engineering, sales, professional services, QA, support, marketing, and our open source community.

FlexSim

2014 - 2019

Senior Technical Writer

Wrote and edited product documentation for FlexSim, a 3D simulation software tool. Responsibilities included:

  • Improving brownfield documentation created by engineers to make it more user-friendly and task-oriented.
  • Collaborating with professional services to design high quality training tutorials.
  • Building a new doc tooling system in HTML/CSS/Javascript from scratch.
  • Creating and socializing a company style guide.

Utah Valley University

2008 - 2014

Lecturer

Taught technical writing courses for developers and academic writing courses for first-year students.

Yahoo

2006 - 2008

Technical Writer

Created user guides and videos for more than 40 internal DevOps tools.

Education

Master of Arts in English

University of Utah

2003 - 2005

English, American Studies with an emphasis in Film

University of Utah stadium

Tools and skills

Percentages indicate my competencies in each domain.

Docs-as-code tool chains

Markdown, reStructured text, static site generators

85%

CI/CD

Git, GitHub, GitLab

80%

Unix systems

Linux, bash, and command-line interfaces

60%

Tech writing content management systems

DITA, Oxygen, XML, SDL Tridion

50%

Programming languages

Python and Javascript

40%

Visual design tools

Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma

60%

Community service

The Good Docs Project

2020 - present

Community manager

The Good Docs Project is an open-source project that educates and empowers developers to create high-quality documentation by providing them with free resources, best practices, and tools to enhance their documentation in open source and beyond.

  • Manage a rapidly growing open-source community of 75+ 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.

Write the Docs

2020 - 2023

Staff, Meetup program coordinator

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 provided quarterly online education meetups and social networking events for more than 1,000 technical writers in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.