The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder. ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

2017 marks two decades since I was first introduced to the concept of “open source” (though the term wasn’t coined until later), and a decade since I made my first open source documentation contribution. Each year since has marked another milestone on that journey: new projects, new toolchains, becoming a core contributor, new languages, and becoming a Program Technical Lead (PTL).

2017 is also the year I will take a step back, take a deep breath, and consciously give the limelight to others.

As an idealistic young university undergraduate I hung around with the nerds in the computer science department. I was studying arts and, later, business, but somehow I recognized even then that these were my people. I’m forever grateful to a young man (his name was Michael, as so many people in my story are) who introduced me first to IRC and, gradually, to Linux, Google (the lesser known search engine at the time), HTML, and the wonders of open source. He and I were the first people I knew to use USB storage drives, and oh how we loved explaining what they were to the curious in the campus computer lab.

After university, I found myself working for a startup in Canberra, Australia. Although the startup eventually failed to… well, start, I learned some valuable skills from another dear friend, David. I already knew I had a passion for writing, but David showed me how I could use that skill to build a career, and gave me the tools I needed to actually make that happen. He is also responsible for my first true language love: LaTeX. To this day, I can spot a LaTeX document from forty paces, which has prompted many an awkward conversation with the often-unwitting bearer of the document in question.

In 2007, I began working for Red Hat, in what was then known as Engineering Content Services. It was a heady time. Red Hat was determined to invest in an in-house documentation and translation team, and another man by the name of Michael was determined that this would happen in Brisbane, Australia. It was extraordinary case of right place, right time. I seized the opportunity and, working alongside people I still count among the best and brightest technical writers I know, we set about making that thing happen.

Working at Red Hat in those early days were some of the craziest and most challenging of my career so far. We grew rapidly, there were always several new hires waiting for us to throw them in the deep end, and we had the determination and tenacity to try new things constantly. Release early, release often became a central tenet of our group, and we came up with some truly revolutionary ways of delivering content, as well as some appallingly bad ones. It was here that I discovered the beauty of data typing, single sourcing, remixing content, and using metadata to drive content curation. We weren’t trying to tell stories to our readers, but to give our readers the tools to create their own stories.

As the Red Hat team matured, so too did my career, and I eventually led a team of writers. Around the same time, I started attending and speaking at tech conferences, spreading the word about these new ways of developing content, and trying to lead developers into looking at documentation in new ways. I had a thirst for sharing this knowledge and passion for technical documentation with the world, and with the Red Hat content team slowing their growth and maturing, I found myself craving the fast pace of days gone by. It was time to find a new project.

When I joined Rackspace, OpenStack was starting to really hit its stride. I was on the organizing team for linux.conf.au in 2013 (ably led by yet another Michael), which became known affectionately as openstack.conf.au due to the sheer amount of OpenStack content that was delivered in that year. Anne Gentle had formed the OpenStack documentation team only a year earlier, and I had been watching with interest. The opportunity to work alongside Anne on such an exciting project was irresistible, so by the time 2013 drew to a close, Michael had hired me, and I had become a Racker and a Stacker.

In late 2014, as we were preparing the Kilo release, Anne asked if I would be willing to put my name forward as a candidate for documentation PTL. OpenStack works on a democratic system where individuals self-nominate for the lead, and the active contributors to each project vote when there is more than one candidate. The fact that Anne not only asked me to step up, but also thought I was capable of stepping in her footsteps was an incredible honor. In early 2015, I was elected unopposed to lead the documentation team for the Liberty release, and we were off to Vancouver.

By 2015, I had managed documentation teams sized between three and 13 staff members, across many time zones, for nearly five years. I had a business management degree and an MBA to my name, had run my own business, seen a tech startup fail, and watched a new documentation team flourish. I felt as though I understood what being a manager was all about, and I guess I did, but I realized I didn’t know what being a PTL was all about. All of a sudden, I had a team where I couldn’t name each individual, couldn’t rely on any one person to come to work on any given day, couldn’t delegate tasks with any authority, and couldn’t compensate team members for good work. Suddenly, the only tool I had in my arsenal to get work done was my own ability to convince people that they should.

My first release as documentation PTL was basically me stumbling around in the dark and poking at the things I encountered. I relied heavily on the expertise of the existing members of the group, particularly Anne Gentle and Andreas Jaeger (our documentation infrastructure guru), to work out what needed to be done, and I gradually started to document the things I learned along the way. I learned that the key to getting things done in a community was not just to talk and delegate, but to listen and collaborate. I had not only to tell people what to do, but also convince them that it was a good idea, and help them to see the task through, picking up the pieces if they didn’t.

Gradually, and through trial and error, I built the confidence and relationships to get through an OpenStack release successfully with my team and my sanity intact. This wouldn’t have happened if the team hadn’t been willing to stick by me through the times I was wandering in the woods, and the project would never have gotten off the ground in the first place without the advice and expertise of those that had gone before me. Shoulders of giants, etc.

Somewhat ironically, technical writers aren’t very good at documenting their own team processes, so we’ve been codifying our practices, conventions, tools, and systems. We still have much work to do on this front, but we have made a good start. As the OpenStack documentation team has matured, we have accrued our fair share of tech debt, so dealing with that has been a consistent ribbon through my tenure, not just by closing old bugs (not that there hasn’t been a lot of that), but also by changing our systems to prevent it building up in the first place.

I am now in my tenth year as an open source contributor, and I have four OpenStack releases under my belt: Liberty, Mitaka, Newton, and Ocata. I have been a PTL for two years, and I have seen a lot of great documentation contributors come and go from our little community. I have made an effort to give those who are interested an opportunity to lead: through specialty teams looking after a book or two, release managers who perform the critical tasks to get each new release out into the wild, and moderators who lead a session at OpenStack Summit planning meetings (and help save my voice which, somewhat notoriously, is always completely gone by the end of Summit week).

From these humble roles, the team has grown leaders. In these people, I see myself. They are hungry for change, full of ideas and ideals, and ready to implement crazy schemes and see where it takes them. So, this year, I’m going to take that step back, allow someone else to lead this amazing team, and let the team take their own steps forward. I intend to be here, holding on for the ride. I can’t wait to see what happens next.