Technical Author

I am a technical author specialising in API documentation. My cv is available for download here. I am looking for the difficult stuff. I like the difficult stuff. I am also a competent Python programmer in the market for junior Python/Django roles. 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: poor quality scan here.

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. My reasons for undertaking this project are

  • because I want a personal website as a platform for my scholarly hobbies
  • to demonstrate my technical abilities (coding, database, querying, web)
  • to make a contribution to open source scholarship.

This website is a WordPress multi-site installation with sub-directories. I wrote the themes myself using the ThemeShaper tutorial, with navigation adapted from here, here and here. The Chinese dictionary is a PHP app running in this directory, where I provide more information about what it does and how I wrote it. The code for an earlier version of the app written in Django is on Github.

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).