Welcome to my website, established in April 2015. It is under construction. I have not yet set up email but I can be contacted at
I am a technical author specialising in API documentation and I am also a competent Python programmer. My cv is available for download here. I am looking for the difficult stuff. I like the difficult stuff. My last fulltime job was at Nokia, where I worked on the Symbian kernel documentation set. The Symbian kernel was similar to Linux: interrupt-driven with real-time guarantees, implemented with interrupt handlers, interthread communication and callbacks. The documents were of two kinds, device driver writer guides (how to use the low-level APIs to implement things like USB) and base porting guides (how to implement the API specification on new hardware, the audience being developers writing assembler).
I also wrote the documentation for the Base Services area of the Symbian operating system (the data persistence and internationalisation functionality including the SQL and XML frameworks and the equivalent of the Windows Registry). I am the author of one chapter of a book on the Symbian implementation of SQLite.
A sample of my work on the Symbian kernel is here. It concerns GPIO, General Purpose Input/Output. The text is mine but not the formatting, which is the company standard. The information architecture is DITA and we used the Agile software methodology. Some links are broken as it is taken from a larger set of pages. Samples of graphics are here and here.
Since leaving Nokia in 2012 I have taken time out to work on a personal software project, an autogenerated Chinese historical dictionary. The dictionary is here with an account of the work involved here and an explanation of its purpose here. The source code is on Github. My reasons for undertaking this project are
I have been a technical writer for about 15 years, having previously worked as a research assistant in computational linguistics. My first degree (Classics and Modern Languages) and doctorate (medieval German) are both from the University of Oxford (Queen's College).