$ cat skills.md

Handbooks, brochures, review packages. If it needed to look finished and not fall apart when someone opened it on a different machine, it went through Acrobat. Started at BYU-Idaho, kept going through every full-time role. Fillable forms, comment cycles, the whole PDF circus. (I have opinions about font embedding. You don't want to hear them.)

Process flow diagrams, branding assets, documentation visuals. Built these at BYU-Idaho for program materials, then at Ivanti and Command Alkon where the diagrams had to explain things like device provisioning workflows to people who did not want to read about device provisioning workflows.

Brochures, handbooks, marketing collateral at BYU-Idaho. Then thousands of pages of direct mailers, white papers, and success stories at Parlant Technology. InDesign is the tool you reach for when Word makes you visibly upset. (Word made me visibly upset.)

Scripted, storyboarded, and recorded interactive e-learning tutorials at ivanti and Command Alkon. At ivanti, I proposed the tool to executives and then established video production standards for a 14-person writing team. At Command Alkon, I produced 20+ tutorial videos with captions, audio narration, and interactive components. At Parlant Technology, I used it for customer training curricula. The tool is powerful if you accept that nobody watches a tutorial video all the way through unless there's a quiz at the end.

Program materials at BYU-Idaho. Documentation screenshots at Ivanti and Command Alkon. Website graphics for ARPGamer and Geneva Rock. The common thread is that someone always needs an image resized, cropped, or rescued from a resolution that suggests it was captured on a flip phone.

Product photography and location shots for Beehive Insurance blog content and website. Also shot and edited images for Geneva Rock, WW Clyde, and ARPGamer. Photography for content purposes is less about artistry and more about having a usable image when the stock library doesn't have "concrete batch plant at sunset."

Department web pages at BYU-Idaho, a WordPress site for ARPGamer that hit 18,000 monthly page views, a company website for Geneva Rock, and this portfolio site with its terminal aesthetic. I like building things where I can see the result immediately. (This is probably why I became a writer and not an accountant.)

Full Adobe Creative Suite usage across every major role since BYU-Idaho. The specific combination varies by job: InDesign for marketing at Parlant, Captivate for e-learning at Ivanti, Photoshop everywhere, Illustrator when someone needs a diagram that doesn't look like clip art. Knowing one Adobe tool means learning the next one takes half the time. Knowing all of them means you stop asking "which tool" and start asking "which output format."

Used alongside MadCap Flare at AdvancedMD for online help content. RoboHelp gets the job done for single-source publishing, though I prefer Flare for more complex projects. The skill is adapting to whatever tool is already in place and making it work, not campaigning for a migration in week one.

Freelance graphic design for NAAMTA's IAAA booklet, produced for the 2014 ITIC tradeshow in Venice. Marketing materials at Parlant Technology and Beehive Insurance. Branding assets at BYU-Idaho. I am not a designer by training, but I've done enough production work to know the difference between a layout that works and one that technically has all the elements on the page.

Created infographics for blog content at Beehive Insurance and marketing materials at Parlant Technology. Infographics are the Trojan horse of content marketing: people share them because they look interesting, and in the process they absorb the information you actually wanted to communicate.

Page layout for thousands of pages of marketing collateral at Parlant Technology in InDesign. Award applications at WW Clyde. Handbooks and brochures at BYU-Idaho. Layout is the invisible architecture of a document. When it's good, nobody notices. When it's bad, everyone notices but can't explain why.

Process flow diagrams and architecture visuals for documentation projects. OmniGraffle is the tool I reach for when I need a diagram that looks professional and I'm working on macOS. It does stencils, layers, and export formats without the overhead of a full Adobe install.

Direct mailers, brochures, and marketing collateral at Parlant Technology--thousands of pages sent to print. Handbooks at BYU-Idaho. Award applications at WW Clyde. Print production is where you learn that CMYK and RGB are not interchangeable, bleeds matter, and the printer will find the one mistake you missed.

Documentation screenshots at Ivanti (18 modules), Command Alkon (300+ page help portal), AdvancedMD, and Dremio. Product screenshots for TopTenREVIEWS. The unglamorous truth is that screenshots are the most viewed part of most documentation. Annotated, cropped, and consistently formatted. SnagIt for capture, Photoshop for cleanup.

Primary screenshot tool at Ivanti and Command Alkon. Callouts, step numbering, blur for sensitive data, cropping. SnagIt sits between "just use Print Screen" and "open Photoshop for every image." It handles 90% of documentation screenshot needs without the overhead.

Produced 20+ tutorial videos at Command Alkon with captions, audio narration, and interactive components in Adobe Captivate. Established video production standards for a 14-person writing team at Ivanti. Video tutorials are documentation for people who don't read documentation, which means they're arguably the most important documentation you can produce.

Ghost-wrote insurance blog posts at Beehive that helped drive a 34% organic traffic increase in 3 months. Wrote blog content for Geneva Rock, ARPGamer, and now southpawriter.com. The trick to a good blog post is knowing what to leave out. (I am still learning this.)

WordPress publishing at Beehive Insurance, Geneva Rock, and ARPGamer. CMS publishing at Purch. Help portal deployment at Command Alkon. Every platform has its own way of making a simple publish button complicated, and I've clicked most of them.

Built content roadmaps at Beehive Insurance to guide blog strategy around SEO keyword targets. Did the same at Geneva Rock for their website launch. At southpawriter.com, planned and sequenced a 12-post blog series with dependencies mapped between them. A roadmap without deadlines is a wish list.

Marketing copy for Beehive Insurance, Geneva Rock, WW Clyde. Success stories and white papers at Parlant Technology. SEO-driven articles at Purch. Copywriting has a conversion goal; technical writing has a comprehension goal. Same discipline. Different target. The writing doesn't know the difference.

Developed brand-consistent content for Beehive Insurance as part of a Clyde Companies initiative to unify their child companies' web presence. Applied the same discipline at Geneva Rock and WW Clyde. Corporate branding for a writer means voice, tone, and knowing which adjectives are approved.

Wrote evergreen blog content at Beehive Insurance on insurance tips and industry guidance. These posts were designed to drive organic traffic long after publication. At Purch, learned the hard way that "evergreen" means different things to SEO teams and editorial teams. The SEO team is usually right.

Ghost-wrote blog posts for insurance agents at Beehive who needed content but didn't have time (or inclination) to produce it. Interviewed them for ideas, wrote drafts in their voice, then handed it back for review. The goal is that the reader never suspects a second person was involved. The agents certainly didn't advertise it.

Wrote press releases at Beehive Insurance for company milestones and initiatives. Also wrote and edited news releases at BYU-Idaho. The format is rigid, the word count is tight, and the headline has to do all the work. Good training for any kind of concise writing.

Content strategy at Beehive Insurance as part of the Clyde Companies web initiative. Geneva Rock and ARPGamer too. Social media is compression. Same message, one-tenth the words. No room for nuance, which is hard for someone who likes nuance. You learn to let go.

Wrote customer success stories at Parlant Technology as part of their sales collateral. At Beehive Insurance, used client outcomes to build trust-building blog content. The structure is always the same: problem, solution, result. The skill is making it not read like a template.

Developed audience personas at Beehive Insurance to target content at specific customer segments. Applied persona-driven writing at Purch, where different sites served different verticals. Personas are only useful if they change what you write. Otherwise they're just a slide in a deck nobody opens.

Wrote a comprehensive white paper on chronically truant students at Parlant Technology that was praised by educators. Built white papers and success stories at Parlant as part of a broader marketing content operation that totaled more than 3,000 pages of completed copy. A white paper is the one piece of marketing collateral where you get to actually prove something instead of just claiming it.

Product lineup research at Purch--identifying competitors, evaluating features, and ranking products across consumer electronics and software categories. Market buyer research at Parlant Technology with intern teams. Competitor analysis for SEO keyword targeting at Beehive Insurance and Geneva Rock. You can't write about a product category without knowing every other product in it.

Developmental and structural editing across all content types: blog posts at Beehive Insurance, marketing copy at Parlant, documentation at Ivanti and Command Alkon, award applications at WW Clyde. Content editing is the stage where you ask "does this make sense" before you ask "is this spelled correctly." Different question. Different skill.

SEO content optimization at Purch across multiple web properties. Blog content tuning at Beehive Insurance and Geneva Rock. The work is reviewing what's already published, identifying what's underperforming, and adjusting keyword targeting, structure, or metadata to improve search visibility. Sometimes the best new content is old content that finally has the right title tag.

Content strategy at Beehive Insurance as part of the Clyde Companies web initiative. Blog and SEO strategy at Geneva Rock for their website launch. Content planning at Purch across TopTenREVIEWS, Tom's Guide, and Tom's Hardware. Strategy is the thing that turns "we should write more" into "here's exactly what we should write, when, and for whom."

News articles and gaming journalism at ARPGamer and Purch. Press releases at BYU-Idaho and Beehive Insurance. The journalism training shows up everywhere: lead with the most important information, attribute your sources, and never bury the point in the third paragraph. (Technical writing buries things in the third paragraph constantly. Old habits die hard.)

Launched and coordinated a quarterly client newsletter at Parlant Technology, managing research, writing, design, and distribution across marketing staff. Introduced a monthly internal company newsletter to improve internal communications. Newsletter writing is email marketing's quieter sibling--less flashy, more useful, and the ROI only shows up if you keep doing it consistently.

This portfolio site. The blog. The research publications. Self-publishing means you own every step: writing, editing, design, SEO, deployment, and the moment you discover a typo at 2am. The upside is creative control. The downside is that there's no one to catch the things you miss.

REST API documentation at Ivanti covering 18 enterprise software modules, including endpoint references, configuration payloads, and code samples. SQL reference documentation at Dremio for 150+ engineers. API docs are the one type of writing where your audience will actually tell you if you got something wrong--usually within minutes, usually in a GitHub issue.

Taxonomy design, metadata structures, and governance frameworks at KBR Wyle across multiple concurrent USAF contracts. Content models at Ivanti spanning 18 software modules. The work is deciding where everything lives before anyone writes a word. Get it wrong early and you spend the next two years migrating. Get it right and nobody notices, which is the point.

Defined and maintained content governance frameworks at KBR Wyle: editorial workflows, document lifecycle rules, multi-round review processes, quality standards. At Command Alkon, governed a team of 8 writers against a shared style guide. At southpawriter.com, built publishing checklists, voice profiles, and review pipelines. Governance is the thing nobody wants to set up and everybody is grateful exists.

Brochures, handbooks, and reports at BYU-Idaho. That was manageable. Ivanti was 18 software modules. Command Alkon was migrating a 500-page PDF into something a human could actually navigate. The scale kept growing. The underlying problem never changed--it just got louder.

Coordinated documentation and content operations workflows at KBR Wyle across engineering, program management, and QA teams on multiple active contracts. Managed content calendars, revision cycles, and deliverable tracking at ARPGamer with 10 freelance writers. At Dremio, ran the entire documentation pipeline as a solo writer supporting 150+ engineers. Content operations is project management for people who also have to do the writing.

WordPress at Beehive Insurance, Geneva Rock, and ARPGamer. MadCap Flare at Ivanti and Command Alkon. Hugo at Dremio. Docusaurus for this site. Every CMS promises to make publishing easy. None of them do. But some make it less painful, and knowing which one to pick for a given project is half the battle.

200+ pages at BYU-Idaho, all against the Chicago Manual of Style. News releases, handbooks, research reports. Purch was SEO content with a different set of rules. Dremio was SQL docs where a misplaced comma could change the query. Style guides change. The compulsion doesn't.

Publishing checklists. Voice profiles. Style guides. Review workflows. Each piece of content runs through a defined pipeline before it goes live: tone, SEO, structured data, the works. Nobody wakes up excited about governance. But nobody wakes up excited about fixing a typo in production, either.

Created blog post templates and process guidelines at Beehive Insurance so contributors could write consistently without hand-holding. Built documentation templates at Ivanti and Command Alkon. A good template is invisible: people use it without thinking about it. A bad template is the thing everyone copies and then immediately modifies beyond recognition.

First real project was a 15-page instructional book for BYU-Idaho's annual Boy Scout Powwow. By Ivanti it was 18 enterprise software modules. By Command Alkon it was a help portal from scratch. By Dremio it was SQL references that engineers would actually read. The scope kept growing. The process never changed: find out what the thing does, explain it to someone who doesn't know. Resist the urge to editorialize. (I don't always resist.)

Writing a clear specification for a bad idea is difficult. The spec fights back. It asks uncomfortable questions and exposes assumptions. By the time the docs can stand on their own, you know whether the project is worth building. The side effect is a lot of Markdown files. The upside is very few "wait, what is this supposed to do again?" conversations.

Editor at BYU-Idaho's Instructional Development department. 30+ documents for a new teaching methodology. The faculty response was positive, which in academic circles means nobody filed a formal objection. Marketing copy at Parlant after that. Editorial standards at Purch. Different contexts, same red pen.

13 projects across southpawriter.com, each following a consistent template: overview, architecture, status, links. Structured docs, glossaries, cross-linked reference material. The goal is that a visitor always knows where to find what they need. Or at least knows that it doesn't exist yet, which is also valuable information.

Knowledge base articles at Beehive Insurance for common customer questions. Self-service content at Command Alkon and Dremio. A good KB article answers the question before someone picks up the phone. A great one makes them feel slightly embarrassed for almost calling. (In a kind way.)

Solicited peer reviews from insurance agents at Beehive to ensure accuracy and stakeholder buy-in. Ran peer review cycles at Command Alkon with 8 writers. At Dremio, reviewed with engineering. The process is simple: write, share, listen, revise. The hard part is the "listen" step.

30+ documents, 80+ pages at BYU-Idaho. Grammar, style adherence, the full sweep. Brochures, handbooks, reports. Group settings and solo. This carried into every subsequent role because there is no product where a typo in the release notes is acceptable. (There is also no product where someone doesn't try.)

Wrote proposals at Beehive Insurance for service engagements. At Parlant Technology, produced 2 to 3 custom RFP responses a week. Each one required understanding the prospect's problem, mapping it to our solution, and making the case in their language. Proposal writing is sales in document form, which means the formatting matters almost as much as the content.

Assumed Bid Desk responsibilities at Parlant Technology, planning and writing 2-3 individually tailored RFP responses per week. Increased yearly sales presentations by 12% and contract wins by 7%. Also wrote the company's first value proposition documents--custom reports interviewing district administrators and compiling enrollment data, truancy stats, and projected outcomes into a single argument for partnership. The prototype won a contract with a 60,000-student school district. RFPs are where writing speed, domain knowledge, and persuasion all have to work at the same time.

Insurance agents at Beehive. Engineers at Dremio. Developers at Ivanti and Command Alkon. Different domains, same technique: ask "why" more than "what." And don't pretend you understand something when you don't. The pretending is what kills the documentation.

Built my first at BYU-Idaho for a faculty teaching model. Then Ivanti needed one to standardize help libraries across a company rebrand. Then Command Alkon needed one to train 8 technical writers. A style guide is only as good as the number of people who actually read it, which is why mine tend to be short.

From software documentation at Ivanti (18 modules) and Command Alkon (300+ page help portal) to API and SQL reference at Dremio. Technical writing is translation: take what the engineer knows, figure out what the user needs, and bridge the gap without dumbing it down or drowning them in jargon. Simple in theory. Fifteen years of practice says otherwise.

Applied topic-based authoring at Beehive Insurance for blog content and at every technical writing role since. At Ivanti and Command Alkon, structured help content in MadCap Flare around single-topic pages. The discipline is resisting the urge to cram three ideas into one article because they're "related."

Microcopy, tooltips, hover text, and in-app guidance at Ivanti across 18 enterprise software modules. Participated in UX design discussions with product owners on terminology consistency and user-facing language. At Command Alkon, wrote contextual help tied to specific UI elements. UI writing is technical writing compressed to its smallest useful unit. Every word earns its place or gets cut.

Proposed Adobe Captivate to executives at Parlant Technology for interactive tutorial development--it was adopted company-wide. At Ivanti, established video production standards for a 14-person writing team. At Command Alkon, produced 20+ tutorial videos with captions, audio narration, and interactive components. Training content has the same problem as documentation: the people who need it most are the least likely to seek it out. So you make it short, clear, and impossible to ignore.

Primary authoring tool at ivanti (18 enterprise modules) and Command Alkon (built a 300+ page help portal from scratch). Used Flare for single-source publishing to produce responsive HTML5 online help, PDF, and print outputs from a shared content base. Also managed conditional content, variables, and snippets for multi-product documentation. At AdvancedMD, used it alongside Adobe RoboHelp. If you need one tool for structured authoring, topic-based content, and multi-format publishing, Flare is the answer. (I have tried the alternatives.)

Department web content at BYU-Idaho. Then 5,000+ words a week at Purch across multiple sites. Blog posts for Geneva Rock. Documentation portals at Dremio on Hugo. Writing for the web means accepting that nobody reads your beautiful paragraph. They skim the headers and the bold text. So you put the important stuff there.

Content publishing workflows at Beehive Insurance--contributors stopped asking "what do I do next?" after every step. Documentation workflows at Command Alkon for 8 writers. A publishing pipeline at southpawriter.com from draft to live. A good workflow disappears. You stop thinking about the process and start thinking about the work. That's how you know it's working.

Audited documentation libraries at Ivanti during a company rebrand to identify outdated, redundant, and conflicting content. Content audit at Command Alkon as part of migrating from a 500-page PDF to a structured help portal. At southpawriter.com, audited blog and portfolio content for GEO best practices. An audit is the unglamorous first step that makes every other content decision possible.

Quality standards at KBR Wyle for USAF contract deliverables--every document passed through multi-round review before submission. At Command Alkon, established quality benchmarks for a team of 8 writers. At southpawriter.com, built publishing checklists and voice profiles to enforce consistency. Quality is not a final review step. It's a habit that runs through the entire process.

Process flow diagrams, architecture visuals, and system diagrams at Ivanti, Command Alkon, and KBR Wyle. Created in OmniGraffle, Adobe Illustrator, and Mermaid. A good diagram communicates in seconds what a paragraph takes minutes to parse. The trick is knowing when a diagram helps and when it's just decoration.

Worked with DITA-structured content at Ivanti for multi-product documentation. DITA enforces structure at the authoring level: topics, maps, reuse. It's the heavy machinery of technical writing. You don't need it for a blog post, but when you're managing 18 product modules with shared content, structure isn't optional.

Document control processes at KBR Wyle for USAF contract deliverables--revision tracking, approval workflows, and distribution lists under government standards. At NAAMTA, maintained document records for ISO 9001 compliance. Document control is the bureaucracy that prevents the wrong version from reaching the wrong person at the wrong time.

Multi-round review processes at KBR Wyle with engineering and QA teams. Peer review cycles at Command Alkon across 8 writers. SME reviews at Dremio with 150+ engineers. At Ivanti, coordinated reviews across 9 dev teams in 4 countries. The review process works best when it's built into the schedule, not bolted on at the end.

Built editorial workflows at KBR Wyle for defense documentation deliverables. Content publishing pipelines at Command Alkon for biweekly release notes. Blog editorial processes at Beehive Insurance. At Purch, followed editorial workflows for 7-10 articles per week across multiple sites. A workflow is only as good as the weakest handoff point.

Engineering documentation at KBR Wyle for USAF avionics and cybersecurity systems. Technical specs and hardware documentation at Ivanti. CAD documentation from SolidWorks outputs. Engineering docs live at the intersection of technical accuracy and readability, and the engineers will let you know if you get either one wrong.

MadCap Flare at Ivanti and Command Alkon. Adobe RoboHelp at AdvancedMD. These tools do single-source publishing, conditional content, TOC management, and multi-format output. The authoring tool matters less than knowing how to structure content for reuse, but knowing the tools means you can start producing on day one.

Installation guides and deployment documentation at Ivanti for enterprise software across Windows, iOS, and Android. At Command Alkon, wrote installation procedures for web and mobile products. Installation guides are the documentation equivalent of assembly instructions: they need to be right the first time because the user only reads them once.

Metadata design at KBR Wyle for document classification across USAF contracts. SEO metadata at Beehive Insurance, Geneva Rock, and Purch. Structured data markup at southpawriter.com (JSON-LD, Open Graph, meta keywords). Metadata is the infrastructure nobody sees and everybody benefits from. Until it's wrong.

Online help systems at Ivanti (18 enterprise modules), Command Alkon (300+ page portal from scratch), AdvancedMD, and Dremio. Built in MadCap Flare and Hugo. Online help is the documentation that lives closest to the user, which means it has to be fast, accurate, and contextual. Nobody launches the help system to browse.

Quick-start guides at Ivanti for enterprise software onboarding. At Command Alkon and Parlant Technology for new product features. A quick-start guide is the hardest documentation to write because you have to decide what to leave out. Everything feels important when you're the one who documented all of it.

SQL reference documentation at Dremio. API reference at Ivanti. Configuration reference at Command Alkon. Reference guides are meant to be searched, not read. Structure and findability matter more than narrative flow. If someone can't find the parameter they need in 30 seconds, the reference guide has failed.

Biweekly release notes at Command Alkon across all web and mobile products: curating Jira boards, interviewing SMEs, soliciting feedback, and publishing to the live help server. Release notes at Ivanti and Dremio aligned to sprint cycles. Release notes are the documentation nobody appreciates until the update breaks something and they need to know what changed.

Product specifications at Command Alkon and Ivanti. Technical specifications at KBR Wyle for USAF contracts. A specification is a contract between what was promised and what gets built. Writing one forces clarity. The ambiguity you leave in the spec is the ambiguity you'll debug later.

Structured authoring at Ivanti and Command Alkon in MadCap Flare using topic-based, single-source content models. DITA content structures. Portfolio content on southpawriter.com following consistent templates with defined frontmatter schemas. Structured content is the prerequisite for reuse, search, and any kind of content at scale.

Taxonomy design at KBR Wyle for document classification across USAF contracts. Content taxonomy at southpawriter.com for portfolio tagging and skill categorization. Product categorization at Ivanti across 18 software modules. A taxonomy is the skeleton of your information architecture. If the categories don't make sense, nothing built on top of them will either.

Terminology standardization at Ivanti during a company rebrand (LANDESK to Ivanti). Consistent product naming at Command Alkon across documentation and UI. KBR Wyle terminology for defense documentation. Terminology management is the thankless work that prevents the support team from fielding calls about whether Device Manager and Endpoint Control are the same thing. (They are.)

User-facing content at Ivanti, Command Alkon, and AdvancedMD. Blog content at Beehive Insurance written for customers, not executives. The difference between user content and internal documentation is empathy. You have to understand what the user knows, what they don't know, and what they're trying to accomplish right now.

User manuals and guides at Ivanti (18 enterprise modules), Command Alkon, AdvancedMD, and Parlant Technology (500+ pages of software and hardware procedures). A user guide is the most traditional form of technical writing and arguably the most important. It's also the one most likely to sit unread until something breaks.

Atlassian Confluence wikis at Ivanti, Command Alkon, and Dremio for internal documentation, meeting notes, and project tracking. Wiki documentation works when there's a clear owner and an update cadence. Without both, it becomes a museum of good intentions from 2019.

XML content in MadCap Flare at Ivanti and Command Alkon. DITA XML authoring. Configuration files and API payloads at Dremio. XML is the format that powers most enterprise documentation tools, whether you see it directly or not. Understanding the structure means you can troubleshoot when the publishing pipeline breaks.

Prompt pipelines for Lexichord's editorial AI stack. 8 specialist agents for Sidekick. The work is designing structured inputs, managing context windows, and building workflows where AI does the heavy lifting under human editorial control. If your prompt strategy is "try different phrasings until it works," that's not engineering. That's hope.

Built a 30+ page SEO research plan at Beehive Insurance covering keyword density, relevance, and weight. Applied keyword research at Geneva Rock for their site launch and at Purch for high-volume content. The data tells you what to write about. Your instincts tell you how. The data is usually more reliable.

At Ivanti, standardized help libraries for a rebrand. At Command Alkon, replaced a 500-page PDF with a 300+ page structured help portal. At Dremio, rewrote 300 help topics in 3 months. The pattern is the same everywhere: someone hands you a broken process, you figure out why it's broken, you fix it, and then you document how you fixed it. (Because I physically cannot stop documenting things.)

Research reports and teaching materials at BYU-Idaho. Then empirical studies: FractalRecall D-21 through D-23, measuring whether metadata-enriched embeddings improve retrieval. (D-22 showed +16.5% NDCG from a 24-token prefix. It did.) Published findings on the access paradox in llms.txt adoption, where the AI systems the standard is designed to serve keep getting blocked by the infrastructure protecting the sites hosting them.

LlmsTxtKit (parser, validator, MCP server). DocStratum (linter for llms.txt files). Sidekick (JetBrains Rider plugin with local-only AI). All C#/.NET. Zero external dependencies where possible. I chose C# in a Python-dominated AI world because the ecosystem needed these tools and the Python people were busy arguing about package managers.

Web content formatting at BYU-Idaho. WordPress theming at ARPGamer. Company site at Geneva Rock. Responsive help library templates at Ivanti. This portfolio site, with the terminal aesthetic, orange glow effects, and expand animations. CSS is one of those skills where you never stop learning, partly because the spec never stops growing.

lint-my-lines (24-rule ESLint plugin for code comments). Error Glossary (human-readable error explanations). git-chronoscope (Git history time-lapse). shell-spec (testing framework for shell scripts, written in shell script, because irony is underrated). Circus (Mac provisioning in one command). Each one was born from staring at a gap in my workflow and deciding the gap wasn't going to fill itself.

Department web pages at BYU-Idaho. SEO content at Purch. Website maintenance at Parlant. Help authoring in MadCap Flare at Ivanti and Command Alkon. Every help portal, blog post, and website starts with markup. Semantic HTML is a solved problem that people keep unsolved by reaching for a framework first.

Track Changes, comments, styles, templates. Used Word at Beehive Insurance for content drafts and stakeholder reviews. Used it at Parlant for RFP responses. Used it at BYU-Idaho for everything. Word is not glamorous, but it's the lingua franca of "please review this document," and pretending otherwise doesn't make the .docx go away.

Primary OS at BYU-Idaho, AdvancedMD, Ivanti, Command Alkon. Software testing, VMs, MadCap Flare, the full Adobe suite. Enterprise application workflows that only ran on Windows because someone made that decision in 2007 and nobody revisited it. (I'm on macOS now, but the muscle memory is permanent.)

Blog publishing at Beehive Insurance. Company website at Geneva Rock. ARPGamer, which hit 18,000 monthly page views. Plugin configuration, theme customization, SEO setup, the whole ecosystem. WordPress is not the most elegant solution to any problem, but it's frequently the most practical one.

Jira at Ivanti, Command Alkon, and Dremio for sprint tracking, task management, and release planning. Curated Jira boards for release notes at Command Alkon. Jira is the tool that makes Agile possible and also the tool that makes people question whether Agile is worth it. (It is. Probably.)

Confluence at Ivanti, Command Alkon, and Dremio for internal documentation, meeting notes, project specs, and team knowledge bases. Confluence is only as useful as the culture around it. When people update pages, it's indispensable. When they don't, it's an archive.

Docker for development environments and deployment at Dremio. Container-based workflows for documentation tooling. Docker solves the environment consistency problem, which is the problem you didn't know you had until your build breaks on someone else's laptop.

Git at Dremio for documentation in Hugo. Git workflows at OpenDAoC for C# contributions. Git for this portfolio site. Source control for documentation at Ivanti (Subversion, then Git). Version control is the safety net that lets you make bold changes without permanent consequences. Also the tool that produces the most confusing error messages in computing.

GitHub for OpenDAoC contributions, developer tools (LlmsTxtKit, DocStratum, lint-my-lines), and this portfolio. Pull requests, issue tracking, Actions CI/CD, release automation. GitHub is the public face of open-source work and the reason I have commit graphs to show for side projects.

GitLab for documentation version control and CI/CD pipelines. Similar workflow to GitHub but with integrated DevOps features. The platform matters less than the Git workflow underneath it.

Hugo for documentation at Dremio. The site was fast, the build was fast, the Markdown-to-HTML pipeline was exactly what a solo writer supporting 150+ engineers needed. Hugo trades flexibility for speed, which is the right trade when your priority is publishing 300 help topics in 3 months.

JavaScript for this portfolio site (React/Docusaurus), browser extensions, and web tooling. Custom components, interactive skill cards, and the expand animations you see on this page. JavaScript is the language you learn whether you planned to or not, because everything touches the browser eventually.

JSON configuration at Ivanti and Command Alkon. JSON-LD structured data at southpawriter.com. API payloads at Dremio. JSON is simple enough to read, structured enough to parse, and ubiquitous enough that every developer and technical writer needs to be fluent in it.

Linux servers at Dremio and OpenDAoC. Command-line workflows, SSH access, server administration basics. Linux is the environment where most production software actually runs, which means understanding it is part of understanding the systems you document.

Primary OS for all current work: writing, development, and tooling. Built Circus (Mac provisioning in one command) to automate setup. Transitioned from Windows after a career of enterprise software environments. macOS is where I do my best work now, mostly because I set it up exactly the way I want it.

Markdown for documentation at Dremio (Hugo), OpenDAoC, and this portfolio (Docusaurus). Blog posts, research papers, README files. Markdown is the lingua franca of developer documentation. It's simple, portable, and version-control-friendly. What it lacks in formatting power it makes up for in not being Word.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook across every full-time role. The specific applications vary but the constant is that someone will send you a .docx and expect you to do something with it. Microsoft Office is not exciting. It is, however, unavoidable.

SharePoint at KBR Wyle for document management on USAF contracts. SharePoint at Parlant Technology for internal resources. SharePoint is the content management system that enterprises choose because IT already supports it. Working with it effectively means understanding its limitations and building around them.

PowerShell scripting at Ivanti for documentation workflows and software testing. Documented PowerShell-based configuration processes for MDM deployments. PowerShell is the Windows equivalent of shell scripting, with more verbose syntax and better integration with Microsoft's ecosystem.

Python for research tooling (FractalRecall experiments D-21 through D-23), data analysis scripts, and automation. Jupyter notebooks for empirical studies measuring metadata-enriched embeddings. Python is the default language for AI/ML work, which makes it the default language for researching how AI systems interact with documentation.

Slack at Ivanti, Command Alkon, and Dremio as the primary communication channel. Channel management, integrations, and async collaboration across distributed teams. Slack is where the real decisions happen, which is why the Confluence page never gets updated.

SQL reference documentation at Dremio for Apache Iceberg and Nessie catalog queries. Database queries at OpenDAoC for game server data. SQL at AdvancedMD for healthcare data reporting. Writing SQL documentation requires understanding the queries well enough to explain them. Understanding them well enough to write them is a bonus.

Git at Dremio, OpenDAoC, and current projects. Subversion at Ivanti. Source control for documentation means every version is recoverable, every change is attributed, and the merge conflict at 4pm on Friday is someone else's fault. (It is never someone else's fault.)

VS Code for Markdown authoring, web development, and this portfolio site. Extensions for linting, Git integration, and Markdown preview. VS Code is the neutral ground where writers and developers can both work without either side feeling uncomfortable.

YAML frontmatter for every page on this portfolio site. Configuration files at Dremio. CI/CD pipeline definitions. YAML is readable, flexible, and will break your build if you use a tab instead of a space. It teaches discipline through punishment.

SSH for server access at Dremio, server management at OpenDAoC, and remote development environments. SSH keys, tunneling, and remote command execution. It's the tool that makes remote infrastructure feel local, until the connection drops mid-command.

OpenAPI specifications at Dremio for REST API documentation. OpenAPI (formerly Swagger) is the machine-readable description of an API that generates documentation, client libraries, and test cases. Writing OpenAPI specs is technical writing at the schema level--every endpoint, parameter, and response code accounted for.

TOML configuration for Hugo at Dremio and various development tools. TOML trades YAML's flexibility for explicit typing and no indentation sensitivity. A small but meaningful quality-of-life improvement when you're editing config files at midnight.

JSON-LD, Open Graph, llms.txt, meta keywords, canonical URLs, sitemaps, robots.txt. Audited southpawriter.com against GEO best practices and found the usual collection of things nobody thinks about until a crawler does. Traditional SEO is table stakes now. Generative engine optimization is where the interesting problems are.

Meta descriptions, title tags, and Open Graph tags at Beehive Insurance, Geneva Rock, Purch, and southpawriter.com. Structured data markup (JSON-LD) for search engine visibility. Meta tags are the storefront of your content. The page itself might be brilliant, but if the meta description is generic, nobody will click through to find out.

Drove a 34% increase in organic traffic at Beehive Insurance in 3 months through SEO-informed blog content. Keyword-targeted content at Geneva Rock and Purch. Organic traffic is the metric that proves content strategy is working. It takes longer than paid, but it compounds instead of disappearing when you stop paying.

SERP analysis at Purch for content targeting across TopTenREVIEWS and Tom's Guide. SEO keyword research at Beehive Insurance and Geneva Rock. SERP analysis tells you what kind of content Google is rewarding for a given query, which tells you what kind of content to write. Or not write, if someone else already owns that page one.

Google Analytics at Beehive Insurance, Geneva Rock, and ARPGamer. Traffic reporting at Purch. Analytics at southpawriter.com. Web analytics is the reality check for content strategy. The data doesn't care about your editorial calendar. It tells you what's working, what's not, and whether anyone is reading that post you spent three days on.

Cross-department coordination at BYU-Idaho. Nine development teams across 4 countries at Ivanti--daily. Engineering, marketing, support, and training at Command Alkon. At Dremio I was the sole technical writer supporting 150+ software engineers, which is a ratio that teaches you to prioritize. The skill isn't "being friendly." It's knowing which questions to ask and when to stop asking.

Part-time work plus full-time coursework at BYU-Idaho. 300 help topics in 3 months at Dremio. 7 to 10 articles a week at Purch. 2 to 3 custom RFP responses a week at Parlant, alongside everything else. The trick is not heroics. It's scoping correctly and saying no to the things that don't fit.

Managed concurrent content projects at Beehive Insurance across blog, web, and social. Tracked documentation across 18 modules at Ivanti. Maintained release-aligned task boards at Dremio. I use whatever tool the team uses, but the system behind it is always the same: what's next, what's waiting, what's done.

Contract deliverables at KBR Wyle for USAF avionics and cybersecurity programs--Technical Orders, Technical Manuals, IPBs, IDAs. RFP responses at Parlant Technology, 2-3 per week. Documentation releases at Ivanti and Command Alkon aligned to software sprints. A deliverable isn't done when you finish writing. It's done when the stakeholder signs off and stops sending revision requests. (There is always one more revision request.)

Embedded in Agile/Scrum teams at Ivanti across 9 development teams in 4 countries. Sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, post-mortems. At Dremio, aligned documentation releases with engineering sprints for a 150-person team. At KBR Wyle, applied the same cadence to defense contract deliverables. The methodology works when people commit to it. The writer's job is to make sure the documentation keeps pace with the code, which is harder than anyone admits during planning.

At Ivanti, coordinated with 9 development teams across 4 countries plus marketing, sales, support, and training--the first technical writer at the company to establish those cross-functional relationships. At Dremio, bridged engineering and product. At KBR Wyle, coordinated across engineering, program management, and QA. Cross-functional collaboration is just collaboration with extra calendar invites.

Managed 5 interns at Parlant Technology across semester-long research projects. Delegated assignments across marketing staff for quarterly newsletters. At ARPGamer, managed 10 freelance writers. Delegation is a leadership skill disguised as a management task. You have to know what to hand off, who can handle it, and when to check in without hovering.

Editor-in-chief at ARPGamer managing 10 freelance writers. Editorial management at Purch across multiple web properties. Trained and managed the Technical Writing Community of Practice at Command Alkon (8 writers). Hired and trained 4 technical writers at Command Alkon. Editorial management is the work behind the writing.

Trained 8 writers in the Technical Writing Community of Practice at Command Alkon on MadCap Flare and documentation best practices. Hired and trained 4 technical writers of varying skill levels. Managed and mentored 5 interns at Parlant Technology. Advised coworkers and managers on formatting, drafting, and review. Mentoring works best when you remember what it felt like to not know.

Remote work at Dremio, KBR Wyle, and multiple freelance clients. Distributed teams at Ivanti across 4 countries. Remote work requires self-discipline, over-communication, and the ability to get things done without the ambient pressure of an office. It also requires a reliable internet connection, which sounds obvious until it isn't.

Wrote website and blog content for Geneva Rock (aggregate, concrete, asphalt) and WW Clyde (heavy civil construction). Researched industry terminology, interviewed project managers, and turned material specs into readable content. Not the most glamorous subject, but try making a blog post about concrete engaging. It builds character.

Ghost-wrote blog content for Beehive Insurance agents. Had to learn enough about insurance to write accurately, then unlearn the jargon to write clearly. The 30+ page SEO plan I built required understanding which insurance questions people actually search for, which is a surprisingly interesting dataset.

Full-time technical writer at NAAMTA, the National Accreditation Alliance of Medical Transport Applications. Wrote and maintained the organization's 300+ page accreditation requirements handbook, cataloged 5,000+ federal and state regulations across all 50 states for a plagiarism lawsuit defense, and built marketing materials for the International Air Ambulance Alliance (IAAA). Later returned as a freelance graphic designer to produce the IAAA booklet for the 2014 ITIC tradeshow in Venice.

Tracked and updated all internal and external processes at NAAMTA for continuous compliance with ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management System requirements. The effort resulted in the organization achieving its QMS certification during my tenure. The work involved documenting every procedure, mapping process inputs and outputs, and making sure reality matched what the manual said—which is the hard part.

Researched and documented all state and federal regulations regarding ground, air, and aquatic medical transport services across all 50 states at NAAMTA. Produced a comparison matrix of 5,000+ individual regulatory references mapped against the organization's 300+ page accreditation handbook. The documentation was precise enough to serve as evidence in a successful plagiarism lawsuit. Not exciting reading, but the kind of work where precision is the whole point.

Senior technical writer at KBR Wyle supporting U.S. Air Force avionics, cybersecurity, and cyber warfare contracts. Reviewed, edited, and produced Technical Orders (TO), Technical Manuals (TM), Illustrated Parts Breakdowns (IPB), In-Depth Analyses (IDA), and ROM estimates. Handled Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) under federal marking and dissemination requirements. Documented CAD models and MBSE outputs from SolidWorks. This is documentation where "close enough" is not an option.

Content writing for Climate Vault, a carbon credit and sustainability organization. Translated complex emissions trading concepts and environmental policy into accessible web content. Sustainability writing requires explaining both the science and the economics without losing either audience.

Product reviews of smartphones, tablets, and consumer electronics at Purch for TopTenREVIEWS and Tom's Guide. Hands-on testing, spec comparisons, photography, and SEO-driven content. Writing about consumer electronics means staying current with product cycles that move faster than your publication schedule.

Cybersecurity and cyber warfare documentation at KBR Wyle for USAF contracts. Cybersecurity software reviews at Purch (antivirus, VPN, security suites). The cybersecurity space requires precision in terminology and a healthy respect for the fact that vague documentation can have real security consequences.

Founded and ran ARPGamer, covering action RPGs with news, reviews, and editorial content that reached 15,000 pageviews per month. Gaming journalism at Purch. Built media partnerships with studios for early access and beta distribution. Gaming content is a niche that taught me editorial management, SEO, and audience building all at once.

Technical writing at AdvancedMD for electronic health records (EHR) and practice management software. Documentation for medical billing, ICD-10 codes, and protected health information (PHI) workflows. Healthcare IT documentation doesn't just need to be accurate--it needs to be compliant. The stakes are higher than a typo.

Technical writing and marketing at Parlant Technology for ParentLink, a mass notification system for K-12 schools. Wrote a white paper on chronic truancy that was praised by educators. Built value proposition documents interviewing district administrators. Education technology writing requires understanding both the technical product and the human outcomes it affects.

Antivirus software, VPN services, cybersecurity tools, and consumer electronics at Purch for TopTenREVIEWS. Hands-on testing with methodology, screenshots, and SEO-optimized content. Software reviews require balancing thoroughness with readability and honesty with diplomacy. (The honesty part is non-negotiable.)