How-tos and Tutorials
Site Work
Publications
Internal Eng Design Specs.
Guides
Essays









Vicki Brown

Internal Documentation and Content Management

Enhancing Productivity By Improving Communication

Project Examples

I have experience with creating, revising, updating, and editing new or existing documents of various forms, including expertise in editing written information from engineers. Some of the material was originally written by engineers; it was my job to collate and rewrite that existing material, as well as to interview engineers, and add new material.

For the examples below, unless noted otherwise, everything is "new writing" and everything was written by me unless specified otherwise.

A note on working with editors: From 1999 to 2000, I worked in Apple's Technical Publications team, writing for various projects; my two major projects were published as books. Apple's Technical Publications team includes an editor. Thus, there were some changes made between my original text and final publication. The changes, however, were minor.

A few of the magazine articles I have written were also edited slightly before publication. Many, however, were not. MacTech, in particular, appears to consider all copy to be "camera ready".

The Perl book, MacPerl Power and Ease underwent comprehensive peer review and editing. The chapter for the IronPort User (Admin) Guide underwent peer review, editng, and final formatting by the IronPort publications team.

How-tos and Tutorials

I have written and edited numerous how-to's and short tutorials. Many of these were written while I was employed at former companies; I did not retain copies of those documents.

I have also written how-to documents and tutorials on my own time for my own use. These have been posted in the event that others may find them to be of value.

Site Work

  • Project Tracking application - My presentation for the Silicon Valley TWiki User Meetup Event, Fsll 2007.

  • CAB site
    This site was created for a Customer Advisory Board two-day meeting at a previous company.

Publications

I am a co-author of "MacPerl Power and Ease", an introductory book on the Perl language. I wrote all of chapter 4 (in Part I) as well as most of Part II (Learning the Language) and Part IV (Reference).

I have written technical articles for online and print journals. publications. Unless noted on the page as co-authored, these all represent "new material". Links to many of these articles are here.

Internal Engineering Design Specifications

In my position at IronPort Systems, part of my job was to review, revise, and edit engineering design specs. Some of the information in these docs was extracted from notes, code comments, and README files written by engineers. I collated and organized the information, then created the final document.

Availability of samples: Early revisions of these documents are available by request. Note that these examples represent "pre-release, pre-review" versions of internal documents that were eventually published on the company Intranet. I do not have copies of the final revisions. If you are interested, please ask me for the link.

Guides

While at IronPort Systems, I was tasked with writing a chapter for the IronPort Administrator's Guide. IronPort produces an "email appliance". Their users are network and mail administrators. A pre-release copy of that chapter is available to view.

If we meet in person, I can show you a copy of a developer guide, "Inside Mac OS X: Kernel Environment", which I wrote for Apple internal and external developers. This guide was published in book form. I am unable to supply a copy for online review.

Essays

I have written a large number of essays and articles of various forms, including personal commentary, book and software reviews, etc. These can be found in my weblog, commentary.