Currently I am at Microsoft working on AI safety and security best practices for software engineering, including responsible AI policies and Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) requirements.
In a previous role, I was the Senior Technical Writer at Prefect.io, writing, designing, and publishing user guides, tutorials, and API documentation for the Prefect open-source Python dataflow orchestration engine and Prefect Cloud service. I supervised and wrote most of the Prefect documentation up to Prefect v2.8.4.
Here’s an example of the kind of feedback we earned through a focus on delivering quality documentation experiences for users:
I also made significant contributions to the Pydantic 2 documentation.
Writing portfolio
Some additional examples of my publicly available writing:
CSS Basics: The Box Model, Margin, and Padding, a CSS3 tutorial.
Writing About Code: Structure, an article based on a Vermont Code Camp presentation on writing techniques for technical authors. This is an approach to technical writing I still use today.
TapUtils is a set of command line utilities I wrote as a companion piece to an iOS application for capturing craft beer ratings. The app is gone now, but I took documenting the apps as seriously as I would any other project.
Web Page Size, Speed, and Performance, a book published by O’Reilly.
10 Great Features in 10 Different OSes, an article I wrote for Redmond magazine, and one of my favorites from that time. “If you were making the ultimate operating system, what features would you choose?“
I started and contributed to the Visual Studio Magazine “Toolbox” column for many years. Here are a few examples of my column:
- “How To Simplify the Dreaded Task of Documentation Publishing with GitHub Pages”, an introduction to the tools I used to build and publish internal documentation using Markdown and GitHub at ESPN.
- “Automate All the Things: An AutoHotKey Primer for Developers”
- “Bash on Windows: Getting Productive with Windows Subsystem for Linux”
Terrence Dorsey 