Meet the Team¶
Our conference is organized by a dedicated team, many of whom are volunteers and give their time to bring the community together around documentation! This page outlines these folks and what their roles are.
Eric Holscher (he/him)¶
Conference Chair¶
Eric is one of the co-founders of Write the Docs, and also one of the co-founders of the Read the Docs documentation platform. He is the primary chair of the Portland conference, and loves to talk all things docs.
Sam Wright (he/him)¶
Speaker Coordinator¶
Sam writes docs for developers. He is into making computers do the boring bits of writing so he can work on the fun bits. Sam has been organizing Write the Docs conferences for more than a few years now. He lives in ~Berlin~ Athens (Greece) unless he’s off to a conference or death metal festival somewhere.
Katie Janovec (she/her)¶
Executive Producer¶
Katie Janovec is an Event Producer and Project Manager based in Portland, Oregon. She produces a variety of events, including conferences, galas, block parties, dance and music events, and more. Katie enjoys organizing events as it builds community connection, growth, and joy. Katie is excited to be a part of her fifth Write the Docs conference.
Mikey Ariel (she/her)¶
Brand Coordinator¶
Mikey is one of the original Write the Docs Prague conference organizers, and since the beginning of 2023 she has been serving as the chairperson of the global community board. She is an avid singer as well as a dancer, and has probably traveled across more of Europe than you have. Mikey is a content strategist and former technical writer at Red Hat, living in Prague.
Sasha Romijn (she/her)¶
Grant Coordinator¶
Sasha is an independent developer and community organiser, mainly working on Python projects, many of them relating to internet routing. She has organised various conferences, first joining the Write the Docs organising team in 2017. Among other things, she works on support tickets, the website, and is chair of the Atlantic conference.
Rose Williams (she/her)¶
Lightning Talks Coordinator¶
Rose is a documentation advocate, Meetup organizer, and Write the Docs community board member. She currently resides in Florida. She has had the pleasure of organizing WTD Meetup groups up and down the east and west coasts due to her frequent moves. Her board position focuses on supporting Meetup organizers and their events.
Janine Chan (she/her)¶
MC¶
Janine is a documentation nerd up in Canada. She feels so lucky to help organize at Write the Docs so she can nerd out in Portland too! She spends her time putting a lot of effort into complex documentation to make it look like it was easy all along, thinking about making inclusion efforts concrete, running unimpressive distances at unimpressive speeds, hiking, knitting, and swing dancing, albeit non-simultaneously. Her cat remains staunchly uninterested in all of this.
Jerome Villegas (he/him)¶
MC¶
Jerome is a technical writer from Seattle and happy to be MC again at Write the Docs! He transitioned from education years ago and has experience working with organizations from open source, start ups, medium-sized companies, and consulting for large enterprises. He’s typically busy spending time with his family, continuing ongoing fixes to their century home, and rotating through his numerous hobbies.
Kay Smoljak (she/her)¶
Photographer¶
Kay is an Australian web developer based in Athens, Greece. She accidentally became involved with the awesome Write the Docs community after the first EU conference in Budapest (2014) and now takes the official conference photos, as well as running the annual Salary Survey. She considers it a very happy accident indeed.
Swapnil Ogale (he/him)¶
Jodie Putrino (she/her)¶
Stage Manager¶
Jodie manages the Docs team at F5. A longtime attendee of Write the Docs, she loves being able to give back to the community that has given her so much. Outside of work and the wild world of conference organization, Jodie can be found playing in the Colorado mountains, making tasty food, or enjoying live music with her family.
Mindy Moreland (she/her)¶
Stage Manager¶
Mindy serves as the team-of-one technical and UX writer at ConductorOne. She’s a long-time WTD Portland volunteer who is thrilled to be joining the organizing team as a stage manager—a role she last held for the Walla Walla Symphony during college. Mindy is a Portland resident whose favorite things include public libraries, comfy reading nooks, croissants, and making her colleagues laugh.
Ingrid Towey (she/her)¶
Unconference Coordinator¶
Ingrid loves working as an editor, writing coach, and user champion at Red Hat. She blends a UX and Folklore background with editorial expertise and tempers both with the patience learned from 15 years of homeschooling 3 kids. In her down time, you can find her reading, drawing, dabbling with languages, or enjoying Renaissance dance and medieval cooking.
Ryan Macklin (he/they)¶
Unconference Coordinator¶
Ryan splits his cerebral time between being tech writing, UXing, coding, and occasionally game design. By day, Ryan writes and edits software and hardware requirements. Otherwise, he works on game or tooling projects, some light woodworking, and land improvement projects on his homestead in southern Michigan. Warning: Ask him about UX in games, and he may talk your ear off.
Heather Zoppetti (she/her)¶
Virtual Coordinator¶
Heather is a Philadelphia-based writer with a rich background in computer science and technical communication. By day, she programs, builds tools for engineers, and crafts clear, user-friendly documentation. By night, she trades keystrokes for knitting needles, cross-stitch, and other forms of needle witchcraft.
Alicia Lewis (she/her)¶
Welcome Wagon Coordinator¶
Alicia loves to explain complex things in easy-to-understand ways and is passionate about harnessing the talent and collaborative spirit of others. She is currently Principal Technical Writer at Digi International, Inc., where she works closely (and remotely) with her internationally distributed development teams to document embedded Linux systems. She tends to be a human common denominator, bridging personalities and differences to bring people together.
Brooke Wayne (she/her)¶
Welcome Wagon Coordinator¶
Brooke, also known as Batman, is a long time attendee of Write the Docs in Portland and part of the Welcome Wagon since 2024. Hailing from Toronto, Ontario in Canada, Brooke works at FreshBooks in a documentarian role she created on her own. When Brooke’s not writing, she’s playing competitive dodgeball, reading voraciously, or camping in the backcountry.
David Bastedo (he/him)¶
Welcome Wagon Coordinator¶
David is a support operations program manager based in Portland, Oregon. He works with support knowledge bases, documentation analytics, and customer help centers. David has attended Write the Docs since 2016 and has been a part of the Welcome Wagon since 2019.
Mo Nishiyama (he/him)¶
Welcome Wagon Coordinator, Onsite Social Media Support¶
Mo is a Technical Writer for Oregon Health & Science University’s Information Technology Group, working remotely out of the Portland suburbia. His work focuses on making complex technical instructions simple and ensuring their accessibility. Mo has attended Write the Docs’ Portland-based conferences since 2013, and joined the organizer team in 2015. His various interests include injecting 80s song lyrics into everyday conversations, bonding with cats, and promoting the use of Oxford commas.
Daryl White (he/him)¶
Writing Day Coordinator¶
Daryl White is a senior technical writer with MinIO, working remotely out of the mountains of north central Pennsylvania. Aside from writing, he enjoys reading, taking long walks, cats, and the annual rewatch of LOTR extended editions. He plays the piano and has done an occasional yarn project on hook or needles. This is Daryl’s second WTD conference, and the first one on staff.
Kate Mueller (she/her)¶
Writing Day Coordinator¶
Kate is a process and documentation geek working remotely from coastal Maine. She’s currently the host of The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast, writing product docs and creating courses for KnowledgeOwl. She also serves as a hospice volunteer in her local community. She’s an avid hiker, snowshoer, SUPer, and cyclist. Sometimes she manages to weave baskets or build overly simple furniture.
Get involved¶
You can further read descriptions of all the roles in our Event Roles doc.
Interested in being a part of the future team or volunteering? Email us at portland@writethedocs.org.
Social Media Coordinator¶
Swapnil is fortunate enough to live in one of the world’s most liveable cities - Melbourne, Australia. When he is not travelling, trying out new food, binging on Seinfeld and Frasier reruns, or collecting books for his library, he works as a technical writer at Amazon Web Services Australia. He initiated Write the Docs in Australia in 2016 and has been happily running the local meetups and the annual conference since then.