Currently I am at Microsoft as part of the AeGIS team, researching and defining Responsible AI (RAI) standards and best practices for Generative AI and agentic application development, translating ORA policy and SDL requirements into actionable engineering guidance.
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.
Experiments in AI-enabled writing
From late 2024 through the end of 2025, I started, coded, and ran an experimental news summarization newsletter: The Newsie Project.
The Newsie Project explored whether GenAI tools were capable of providing accurate and insightful summarization of breaking news across six or more leading news outlets. What are the key points of a story? What unique highlights do individual newsrooms reveal? How do the stories disagree on details for framing?
I spoke to GNAT-TV’s News Director, Andrew McKeever, about The Newsie Project on his Press Pass show.
Writing portfolio
Working on Microsoft’s AeGIS team on Responsible AI (RAI) standards and best practices has involved translating internal RAI standards to public best practices:
- Threat modeling AI applications (Microsoft Security Blog)
- Observability for AI Systems: Strengthening visibility for proactive risk detection (Microsoft Security Blog)
- Identify risk for autonomous agentic AI systems (Microsoft Secure Future Initiative)
- Secure autonomous agentic AI systems (Microsoft Secure Future Initiative)
- Complete AI threat modeling (Microsoft Secure Future Initiative)
At Game Data Pros, in addition to writing proprietary documentation for custom LiveOps tools, I researched and ghost-wrote a series of thought leadership blog posts covering the history of data-based revenue optimization in the games industry. This was a fascinating project, requiring a deep dive into recent business developments that are not well documented outside of academia. Some of my favorites include:
- A Brief History of Revenue Optimization in Mobile Gaming: The Rise of Free-to-Play Games (Game Data Pros Blog)
- The Origins of Revenue Optimization (Game Data Pros Blog)
Other surviving examples of my publicly available writing include:
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.
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”
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.
Terrence Dorsey 