# Brian Boucheron (@beardic.us)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/beardic.us
Headline: Senior Technical Writer II at DigitalOcean

## About

I am a technical writer focused on writing documentation and tutorials about Linux, DevOps, networking, databases, JavaScript, and general "cloud computing" topics. I enjoy writing for the open source community.

I am comfortable doing research to become my own subject matter expert, or working with highly technical teams of product managers, engineers, and designers.

I have a lot of experience working on documentation infrastructure such as static site generators, CMSs, databases, search APIs, and CI/CD platforms.

## Career

- **Senior Technical Writer II at DigitalOcean** (Feb 2022 - Present)
  Transferred to the Product Docs team and worked with product managers, engineers, and support to ship complete and accurate docs for networking, compute (Functions), and monitoring products.
  
  Worked on documentation infrastructure such as our static site generator, search index, and tooling for testing and deployment.
  
  Provided UX writing support for product designers.
- **Senior Technical Writer II at DigitalOcean** (Sep 2020 - Feb 2022)
  Produced reports and analysis of our top performing tutorials, and shifted to writing about very basic, underserved sysadmin and developer topics based on this internal analysis and further SEO research. Set up and managed a more formal tutorial maintenance process, with the goal of focusing the team's effort on our most popular and most out-of-date tutorials.
- **Senior Technical Writer at DigitalOcean** (Jan 2019 - Sep 2020)
  Planned and executed a project to translate our tutorials into seven different languages. This involved working with a translation vendor, writing lots of glue code (JavaScript) to integrate with our CMS, estimating work volume and budgets, and very detail-oriented quality control work. Published over 2000 translated tutorials, resulting in a 400% YoY increase in traffic to our non-English content.
  
  Wrote more advanced tutorials about Kubernetes, Kubernetes networking, and various multi-server setups, and continued work on tutorial maintenance by coordinating an update sprint for the release of Ubuntu 20.04.
- **Contributing Writer at HackADay** (Oct 2018 - Mar 2019)
  Researched and wrote short posts and feature-length articles for Hackaday.
- **Technical Writer at DigitalOcean** (Mar 2017 - Jan 2019)
  Wrote tutorials about Linux system administration, networking, DevOps, and Kubernetes. Planned and executed maintenance-focused work sprints to keep old content accurate and useful.
- **Graphic Designer at dawnbreaker, Inc.** (2006 - 2017)
  Designed trade show displays, brand systems, and marketing materials. Also created motion graphics and edited instructional videos.
- **Adjunct Instructor at Rochester Institute of Technology** (2011 - 2012)
  Planned and taught a hands-on Adobe Illustrator class.

## Skills

### Technical
- Linux
### Business
- Social Media
- Writing
### Creative
- Adobe Creative Suite
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop
- Graphic Design
- Illustrator
- InDesign
- Logo Design
- Photography
- Photoshop
- Web Design
### Other
- Beekeeping
- Layout
- Mac
- Proofreading
- Typography

## Education

- **Rochester Institute of Technology** — Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) (1998 - 2002)

## Involvement

### Volunteering
- Wayne County, New York (Aug 2023 - Present)
  Election Inspector
  I help out at local polling sites for state and federal elections. (Disclosure: though I view this as a volunteer / civic duty sort of situation, I do get paid a small amount for this work)
- Interlock Rochester
  President
  I helped co-found Interlock, and served as president for three years. Interlock is Rochester's first hackerspace, where we created a community and workspace based around our shared interest in technology, art, science, and education.
  
  As president, I lead meetings, worried about paying rent, herded cats, gave talks, sweet-talked guests and the media, and represented the organization at various events and conferences in the Rochester area.

## Links

- linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-boucheron-05b523107