DevPortal Awards Jury
Each year, the DevPortal Awards seeks the most outstanding solutions with the help of experienced jurors, who are volunteers with extensive knowledge of API programs, developer portals, and API documentation. Here are the members of the Jury Panel in 2023.
Want to know what stood out for them in 2023?
Amy Mbaegbu
Amy Mbaegbu is a Developer Advocate(Internal) at Adyen. At Adyen, her team sits at the intersection of people, processes and tech: focusing on enabling/supporting internal engineers to be successful with building.
Before joining Adyen, she has worked as an IC software engineer, tech lead, technical trainer and Edtech curriculum writer.
She deeply values the power of community/knowledge-sharing, and she believes that it is a key player in any thriving developer program.
Follow Amy on Linkedin.
Anne Gentle
Anne is an industry-recognized author whose books promote collaboration among developers and writers. She works as the Developer Relations Leader at Cisco DevNet, the developer program for Cisco platforms to connect, secure, and automate.
With her team of experts, she supports developer tools for API design, developer documentation, and developer education including infrastructure integration. She wrote a book called Docs Like Code to demonstrate developer tools and workflows like GitHub and automated publishing and code integration, applied in the technical writing world. She proudly serves on the Workforce Advisory Committee at Austin Community College, pushing the field towards future opportunities in API and developer documentation.
Bob Watson
Bob is an experienced Senior Technical Writer who applies research, data, and empathy with the customer to improve the effectiveness and user experience of documentation.
As a "hands-on" technical writer, he strives to be one of the first customers of a new feature or product. This approach produces more customer-oriented writing and higher customer satisfaction with the documentation. In previous positions, this approach has improved documentation readability by 5% in just a few months and reader satisfaction by 20% over the course of several years.
Bob takes a scientific approach to studying how to improve the documentation. First, by making sure the documentation is providing the necessary data to know how it's performing, and adding instrumentation where it's needed. Then by applying sound analytic methods to evaluate the data to fix the problems and sustain the successes.
Documentation analytics, however, is not just about the numbers. He also talks with his readers and reads their feedback to identify areas where content, design, and organization can be improved.
Chris Bush
Chris is a programmer, documentarian, and people manager at MongoDB. Based in New York, he leads a team of writers and developers. His lifelong passion for both computers and languages has led him into this career. Before joining MongoDB five years ago, he led a team who implemented React Native on set-top boxes. As a self-learner, Chris appreciates the need for clear, accessible documentation.
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Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
Fabrizio is a Principal Technical Writer at Splunk. He is a technical, UX, and programmer writer with strong technical skills based in Barcelona, Spain. His specialties are developer and API documentation, though he's also fond of content strategy and UX writing in deeply technical products.
He's been communicating about tech and connecting people at tech companies since 2008, first as a tech journalist and content strategist, then as an API designer and tech writer. As a psychologist who jumped into tech, Fabrizio believes that all companies should have more writers and philosophers and educators in their ranks, that is, more underscore-shaped people.
Follow Fabrizio on Linkedin and read his blog.
Joshua Markham
Joshua is a Senior Manager (Emerging Technologies) at Verizon. He's leading a team of Engineers and Consultants to bring new IoT PaaS and SaaS services to market covering the Western half of the US.
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Kruno Golubić
Kruno has more than 25 years of experience in different fields of IT. His journey into the world of technology began in 1995 when he built his first website. His professional trajectory has been defined by three intersecting domains: information technology, user support, and education.
His extensive career journey has encompassed a wide range of roles, including Helpdesk Manager, Webmaster, System Administrator, and Project Manager. He also has significant experience in teaching and content creation, having worked as a Courseware Author, Lecturer, and Editor.
In his current role as a Technical Writer in the Developer Experience team at Memgraph, Kruno combines his passion and expertise in these fields. He utilizes his background in IT, his skill in user support, and his dedication to education to produce clear, comprehensive, and user-friendly content that enhances the user experience.
In addition to many IT certificates, he holds a BE in Information Technology, an MA in Library and Information Science, and a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences.
Follow Kruno on Linkendin.
Marco Spinello
Marco is a Senior Technical Writer at Sanity.io. He rolled into technical writing from a previous career in software localization. He has authored end-user and developer documentation covering subjects from online gaming to cyber threat intelligence.
He often happened to be the first technical writer at a company, which helped him learn how to build a documentation tool chain, define a house style, and shape a memorable tone of voice.
To promote breaking silos and to support sharing knowledge, he has contributed to internal company initiatives to start a technical documentation guild, and to teach technical writing to software engineers. He also likes starting company bands to make music together.
Michael Richardson
Michael is a software developer, conference speaker, developer community organizer, and outdoor enthusiast. Michael has written software in JavaScript, Java, Kotlin, C#, SQL, Cypher, and even VB.NET. He particularly enjoys mentoring junior developers, clearing roadblocks, and finding common ground. As an engineering manager at Kroger, Michael helps deliver Kroger's unified API platform, creating value for Kroger developers, partners, and customers. He helps to organize the Momentum Developer Conference, the Cincinnati Software Craftsmanship meetup, and the HackCincy hackathon.
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Richard Smedley
Richard is a Principal Technical Writer at Couchbase. He's fond of difficult problems with no clear solution, so feels at home in docs.
Writing in the past for everything from Botany journals, through permaculture curricula, to GNU/Linux magazines, he's now been at Couchbase for a number of years - long enough to be wishing to change most of the things he wrote in his first few years there. Currently trying to adopt a beginner mindset (once again) to improve developer onboarding docs, and the complex journey through trade-offs in a distributed world (all via a dozen SDK programming languages).
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Ryan Clifford
Ryan is Platform Group Product Manager at Spendesk, leading the product team to deliver APIs and integrations to enable companies to have a seamless spending management experience. He has extensive experience working on award winning developer platforms and APIs within financial services and fintech.
He is a strong believer in treating APIs as products so loves designing APIs and building the end-to-end developer experience. Energised by understanding how businesses can leverage APIs and platform thinking to augment current business models and implement new ones.
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Susanna Laurin
Susanna Laurin (CPACC) is the Chair of the Funka Foundation, focusing on end user involvement, disabilities, empowerment and accessibility. She has been a thought leader in the field of digitalisation, inclusion and e-government for more than 20 years and she is a frequent international lecturer and debater.
Susanna is the Chair of the ETSI/CEN/CENELEC Joint Working Group on eAccessibility, responsible for the development and update of the European accessibility standard EN301549, to reflect presumed conformance of the Web Accessibility Directive and the upcoming European AccessibilityAct. As one of the leading experts in EU policy and legislation on accessibility, Susanna is leading strategic assignments and research projects on EU level, nationally and across the world.
Recent assignments for the European Commission include the formal review of the WebAccessibility Directive and a study on cognitive accessibility. Susanna is a co-founder, Representative to the EU and also Past Honorary Chair of IAAP, the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, as well as the Representative to the EU for the UN-initiative G3ict.
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