Catherine A. Jefferson

Objective

A position as a lead or senior technical writer in a networking or computer security-related company that will use and expand my writing, technical, and artistic skills.

Summary of Qualifications

Experienced Technical Writer and Editor. Have been writing and editing technical documentation for the networking, computer security, health care, and electric and gas power industries for twenty years.

• Write clear, coherent prose.
• Know how to gather information on technical subjects from engineering and product development documents, interviews with product managers, engineers, and others who know the product, and hands-on use and testing of the product.
• Regularly blog about spam and security issues.
• Have written several book-length technical documents from scratch, including API documents and other highly technical material intended for an engineering or other technical audience, as well as documents intended for end users and non-technical audiences.
• Have performed detailed edits of documents written by other technical writers and researchers, in some cases documents with multiple authors, to produce a final document that reads smoothly.
• Have developed and worked with single source document sets using XMeTaL with Authoria and FrameMaker, and am thoroughly familiar with DITA and other types of markup.
• Am thoroughly familiar with non-single-sourced documentation in Adobe FrameMaker and Microsoft Word, and have written book-length documents and developed templates using both programs.
• Have a good working understanding of the networking, computing, health care, electric utility, an environmental engineering industries, acquired on the job from engineers, medical researchers, and scientists working in these fields.
• Understand programming concepts, and read and understand code written in JavaScript, PERL, and Unix shell script. To a lesser extent, also read and understand Visual Basic, C and C++.

Experienced Technical Illustrator. Competent technical illustrator with a good grasp of where an illustration will help a user understand a concept, and a touch for developing simple, clear conceptual artwork.

• Familiar with Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Project, and other business graphics programs.
• Familiar with Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, and other professional vector-based illustration programs.
• Familiar with Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, and other professional bitmapped imaging programs.

Experienced WWW Site Developer. Have developed web sites for the high tech, health care, and electrical and gas power industries for over ten years. In addition to my skills as a writer, I bring the following skills to my web development work:

• Familiar with web site development from scratch or using platforms such as WordPress.
• Have strong design skills. Understand how to organize information so that users can find what they need quickly, without wasted time or wrong turns.
• Own and manage hardware servers and cloud instances that host blogs and traditional web sites. Familiar with basic server management of Linux- and *BSD systems.

Related Experience

Senior Technical Writer
Networking and Cloud Group
CITRIX SYSTEMS, INC., Santa Clara, CA
November 2005-Present

• Develop and write documentation for Citrix Application Firewall-related products. Wrote and currently maintain the Citrix Application Firewall Guide. Am responsible for tracking and documenting the ongoing development of the Citrix Application Firewall.
• Develop and write documentation for Citrix NetScaler security features. Am responsible for tracking and documenting the ongoing development of the AAA, protection, rewrite, and URL transformation features.
• Rewrote the Citrix NetScaler Traffic Management Guide and online help for a single sourcing environment.
• Wrote the first version of the Citrix Policy Configuration and Reference Guide.
• Assist with other documentation as needed.

Principal Technical Writer
TEROS, INC., Sunnyvale, CA
February 2002-November 2005

• Wrote the Teros APS documentation set from the ground up, and maintained and expanded these documents through three years of product releases.

NOTE: The APS later became the Citrix Application Firewall.

• Designed the FrameMaker templates used for writing print documentation, electronic documentation, and online help.
• Set up and maintained documentation archives containing all past final versions of the Teros documentation, and beta versions of documentation currently being written or revised.
• Wrote a web interface for the documentation, and set up and hosted the archive on the Intranet.
• Produced most technical and conceptual artwork used within Teros.

Senior Technical Writer (Contract)
CLOSEDLOOP SOLUTIONS, INC., San Carlos, CA
August 2000-July 2001

• Developed online help for three web-based financial applications using a combination of Adobe FrameMaker+SGML, Photoshop, and HTML authoring tools.
• Developed single source documentation system using Adobe FrameMaker+SGML.
• Developed and implemented procedures for producing online help, since Closedloop had no previous technical writers on staff.
• Edited and occasionally wrote material for Marketing and other departments.

Senior Technical Writer
SIEBEL SYSTEMS, San Mateo, CA
April 1999-July 2000

• Wrote the first edition of the Siebel eScript Guide, an API reference to Siebel Systems’ implementation of the JavaScript scripting language.
• Wrote the eMarketing chapter to the Siebel .COM Applications Guide, an approximately 40-page chapter describing how to set up and use Siebel’s eMarketing application.
• Thoroughly revised the Siebel Installation Guide, an approximately 500-page manual that explains how to install Siebel Enterprise Applications, Siebel Systems’ core product line.
• Thoroughly revised the Siebel Upgrade Guide and Siebel Marketing Guide.
• Built a single source document encompassing four different versions of the Siebel Marketing Guide, with conditional text tags and variables that allowed several books to be edited and produced from one set of FrameMaker files.

Senior Technical Editor and Webmaster
VARIAN ASSOCIATES, Oncology Systems, Palo Alto, CA
January 1995-February 1999

Technical Writer & Editor
PACIFIC GAS & ELECTRIC COMPANY (PG&E)
Research & Development, San Ramon, CA
January 1992-December 1994

Education

• Bachelor of Arts in German Literature, 1983. Reed College, Portland, Oregon.