darling docs

About me

Hello, lovely to meet you.

My name’s Sam, welcome to my portfolio.

Hopefully these pieces highlight my interest in technology, health and environmental sciences, and UI/UX. I’m excited to continue to develop and apply my skills in communication, collaboration, and documentation while I work on different opportunities in these fields.

This is me

My education and career paths have taken me in many interesting directions over the years. I began at UBC in pre-veterinary studies, where I enjoyed a balance between science and humanities. Following graduation, I took time to work in the animal care industry before returning to do a Master’s degree at McGill University. My time at McGill provided many excellent learning opportunities. I collaborated with several research projects across the departments of Political Science, Agriculture, and the School of Human Nutrition. Ultimately, my passion for technical communication, documentation, and collaboration proved too great and I transitioned exclusively to technical writing.

In the tech industry, I’ve been fortunate to spend time on many diverse projects. I’ve had the opportunity to work as a technical writer with Income Access, a Paysafe company, and at Workleap (formerly GSoft). For some time I was Technical Communications lead at DataKitchen.

In my spare time, I enjoy baking fresh bread, doing yoga, running with my dog, and learning new languages.

Education

University of Calgary | 2021

  • Certificate specializing in Business and Technical Writing (4.0 GPA)

McGill University | paused 2020

  • M.Sc. in Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Science (3.7 GPA)

University of British Columbia | 2013

  • B.Sc. in Animal Physiology, Department of Biology (3.2 GPA)
  • Minor in English Literature (3.7 GPA)

Courses and certificates

  • UX Writing for Technical Writers, UX Content Collective | 2022
  • Practical CSM Level 1 | 2021
  • BPMN 2.0 Business Process Modelling for Business Analysts | 2021
  • ITIL Foundation Level 1 | 2021
  • Google’s Technical Writing I: The critical basics of technical writing | 2020
  • Google’s Technical Writing II: Intermediate topics in technical writing | 2020
  • Peter Gruenbaum’s API Technical Writing I: JSON and XML for writers | 2020
  • Peter Gruenbaum’s API Technical Writing II: REST for writers | 2020
  • Full Stack Web Developer Bootcamp | 2020
  • Introduction to DITA, at LearningDITA.com | 2020

Skills

English, French (B2)

Software

  • ClickHelp (admin), Zendesk (admin), Document360 (admin),
  • Static site generators, including Hugo, Antora, and Sphinx
  • Gainsight (admin), Hubspot (admin), Salesforce
  • Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Azure (admin)
  • Google, Libre Office
  • Figma, Miro, SnagIt, Shottr
  • Jira, Trello, GitLab, GitHub
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes

Proficient in

  • Markdown
  • HTML
  • CSS

Comfortable with

  • reStructured Text, AsciiDoc
  • XML (DITA)
  • JSON, APIs
  • Git
  • Python
  • SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL
  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • R, AMPL