September 27, 2026

More Than the Words

I love writing, but somewhere along the way I realized that the words were only part of what I loved about documentation.

I love the system around them.

I love figuring out how documentation gets created, how it moves through review, how people contribute to it, how we know when it’s wrong, and what we can automate so humans don’t have to keep doing the same work over and over again.

Give me a messy documentation process and I immediately start wondering how to make it better.

That instinct has followed me through most of my career.

I started with content and process

Long before I was writing API documentation, working in Git, or building documentation with React and Next.js, I was working with content, knowledge, and business processes.

I spent years organizing information, improving workflows, building standards, and trying to make complicated systems easier for people to use.

The tools changed over time, but the questions were surprisingly consistent.

Where does this information belong?

Who owns it?

How do people find it?

Why are we doing this manually?

Why are we maintaining the same information in two places?

What happens when something changes?

I didn't have a name for it then. I just liked making systems work better.

Then I learned to code

Learning software development changed the way I looked at documentation.

Suddenly, many of the problems I had spent years solving through process could also be approached through engineering.

Content could live in source control. Changes could be reviewed through pull requests. Repetitive work could be automated. Structured content could become data. Validation could happen before publication. Documentation could be connected directly to the software development lifecycle.

I didn't stop being a writer when I learned to code.

I became much more interested in what a writer could build.

That's where documentation engineering clicked

Documentation engineering brought together parts of my career that had once seemed separate.

Writing mattered.

So did information architecture, content strategy, governance, developer experience, workflow design, automation, and code.

The documentation itself mattered, but so did the system responsible for producing and maintaining it.

That's the work I love.

I want to write the guide, but I also want to know why the code sample can't be tested automatically.

I want to improve the API documentation, but I also want to know what happens when the API changes.

I want contributors to have standards, but I'd rather build those standards into the workflow wherever we can than depend on everyone remembering every rule.

And if we're maintaining the same information twice, I'm probably going to ask why.

So I built DocOps

This project started because I wanted a place to demonstrate that way of thinking.

I could have built a portfolio page describing my experience with docs as code, APIs, governance, automation, and documentation operations.

Instead, I wanted to build the thing.

DocOps is becoming a working documentation system while I write about the practices behind it. Its content lives in MDX. Its interface is built with React and TypeScript. Documentation navigation is generated from the content itself. Changes are validated before they are published.

And there is much more I want to build.

API tooling. Automated validation. Documentation health. More ways for the system to do work that shouldn't require a person to remember to do it.

Some of those pieces exist today. Others are still ideas waiting to be built.

That's part of the fun.

More than the words

I still love finding exactly the right sentence.

I still care about whether an explanation is clear, whether a procedure is easy to follow, and whether someone can find what they need.

But I've learned that my favorite documentation problems rarely end with the sentence.

They lead to the repository, the workflow, the API, the build, the metadata, the automation, or the process behind it.

The words matter.

I just happen to love everything around them, too.