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.
Meet the members of the Jury Panel in 2024
Alvaro Navarro, Anila Zaidi, Bob Watson, Dan Grabski, Daria Lutchenko, Ellis Pratt, James Noes, Marco Spinello, Michael Meng, Mike Jang, Patricia Rogers, Rachel Lee Nabors, Renishya Jayan, Robert Delwood, Ruby Batallones, Swapnil Sapar
Alvaro Navarro
Alvaro has worked for over a decade developing and advocating good practices regarding developer experiences and developer documentation at companies such as Spotify, Amadeus, and Airbus.
He is currently working as a Senior Developer Advocate at Vonage (Ericsson), helping to build the next generation of Network APIs based on the CAMARA standard.
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Anila Zaidi
Anila is a Staff Technical Writer at Squarespace and part of the internal Developer Experience group. Many moons ago she was a grant writer in the non-profit sector, a COBOL developer, and a Dunkin Donuts clerk. When it comes to technical writing, she loves to bring a holistic approach that involves a deep understanding in documentation platforms, information architecture, and researching any piece of software and its users. She believes the best technical documentation is easily understood rather than read, and something she always strives for as a technical writer.
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Bob Watson
Bob is an experienced Senior Technical Writer who has contributed to the design and content of documentation for software produced by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and others. Bob has experienced technical documentation from just about every possible angle: as a software developer and consumer of technical documentation, as a writer and creator of technical documentation, and as an academic who has observed and measured interactions with technical documentation. He is currently teaching technical writers how to create effective API documentation at the University of Washington Professional & Continuing Education school.
Dan Grabski
Dan is a mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, software engineer, and technical writer. He began his career in professional motorsports as part of an Indy 500 and Indycar championship winning team. He then moved to Portland where he worked in the semiconductor industry for several years, before moving to software development. He currently works as a software engineer and technical writer in the fintech industry.
He currently lives in Portland, Oregon with his family and three cats. He volunteers at Burning Man and regional Burning Man events as a mentor and trainer for his department.
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Daria Lutchenko
Daria is a Documentation Lead at UP42. She brings extensive experience from both big tech and startups. Her passion for clear, straightforward, and honest writing defines her professional approach.
Currently working in the geospatial industry, Daria has had the opportunity to create documentation for various services, including education, crowdsourcing, advertising, and route planning, as well as smart home and app development platforms, aimed at developers and non-technical readers.
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Ellis Pratt
Ellis is a Director at Cherryleaf, a technical writing services and training company based in the UK. He has been working in technical communication since the early 1990s. He is one of the course developers of Cherryleaf’s elearning course on using AI in techcomm. He hosts the Cherryleaf Podcast, a podcast on becoming a better technical and business communicator. He is also a Member of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC), and an Associate of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.
James Noes
James is a Product Manager at The Kroger Co. in the Cincinnati area. He oversees the building of a modern API Platform, which includes Kroger’s Developer Portal, and API Enablement. He has a diverse background in product management, visual design, and technical writing. James is passionate about applying a user-centric approach to creating a seamless and intuitive developer experience.
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Marco Spinello
Marco is a Senior Technical Writer at Booking.com. 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. At Booking.com, he focuses on online accessibility.
He often happened to be the first technical writer at a company, which helped him learn how to build a documentation toolchain (from duct tape and spit to proper GitLab pipelines), define a house style, and shape a memorable tone of voice.
To break silos and to encourage knowledge sharing, he has contributed to internal company initiatives to start a technical documentation guild, as well as teach engineers and product managers how to produce and maintain documentation without hating the universe. He also likes starting or joining company bands to make music together.
Michael Meng
Michael is professor of applied linguistics at Merseburg University of Applied Sciences. He teaches courses on technical communication and information design for bachelor and master students. Before joining university, he worked for 12 years as a technical writer and documentation lead for an international software company. In these roles, he developed and curated a wide range of end-user and developer documentation. Michael initiated several research projects which studied how software developers interact with APIs and which learning strategies they use. Michael also researched on the effective use of multimedia design for technical documentation.
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Mike Jang
Mike is a Principal Technical Writer at NGINX (F5). He creates clear and engaging documentation for developers and sysadmins. He has written authoritative content in Linux, security, and identity management. He is also a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE v5). At a couple of conferences, he spoke about "Minimum Viable API Documentation."
Mike has a diverse array of experiences. He built a docs-as-code documentation practice from scratch, demonstrated the use of APIs for users.
His mission is to share his passion for new software and to help users achieve their goals with the help of his content.
Follow Mike on LinkedIn and read his blog.
Patricia Rogers
Patricia is an API Product Manager with Communify Fincentric. She manages the Developer Platform for a library of financial data APIs used by developers worldwide. Patricia coordinates Fincentric’s API standards and roadmaps across several contributing developer teams.
She tests the function and overall performance of each API in the API library, ensures use cases, onboarding steps and documentation have the needed detail and context for developers.
She publishes API performance reports, reviews load testing results, response times, error rates and availability metrics for the API library. Also, she prioritizes the Developer Portal roadmap to ensure Fincentric is positioned to provide a best-in-class developer experience, deliver AI enhanced search of the Developer Portal and bring AI augmented capabilities to Fincentric’s users in 2025.
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Rachel Lee Nabors
Rachel-Lee Nabors built three-time award-winning react.dev and reactnative.dev with the React teams at Meta. They have spearheaded developer education at FAANG companies like Amazon, spun up documentation teams at startups, and participated in web standards and open source with Mozilla, the W3C, and Microsoft. Before their career in tech, they were known for their award-winning web comics. Now they focus on teaching the world to code with a hot cup of tea.
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Renishya Jayan
Renishya brings nearly 12 years of Technical Writing experience, specializing in simplifying complex technical topics into easily digestible content. Passionate about bridging the gap between technology and users, she ensures effective communication through a human-centric approach. Throughout her career, she has contributed to various aspects of technical writing, including end-user and developer documentation, content strategy, release communication, and UX writing.
As a Senior Technical Writer at Staffbase, Renishya focuses on creating comprehensive developer documentation and improving API specifications, providing developers with clear and concise resources to achieve their goals.
Follow Renishya on LinkedIn or her website.
Robert Delwood
Robert is a programmer, writer, and programmer-writer.
He has written and designed API documentation extensively for such companies as Microsoft, Walmart, and NASA. With a developer background, he focuses on the design of API documents to make them more detailed, convenient to copy and paste from, assessable to all developer grades and ultimately just easier to use.
Robert frequently presents at industry conferences, such as STC (Society of Technical Communication), Write The Docs, and individual chapters, encouraging others to enter this specialty and to help overcome the almost unique writing challenges.
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Ruby Batallones
Ruby Batallones is a Product Manager for Developer Experience at Adyen. At her current role, she enjoys getting a comprehensive understanding of their developer users and figuring out how her team might make better developer journeys through tooling. She works with awesome engineering and design teams in Chicago and Amsterdam. Apart from her product role, she is a core member of the API design review group at Adyen where she advocates for API design best practices across the company.
Prior to her role in product, she worked in various areas in tech: development, support, integration, solution architecture, and developer documentation.
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Swapnil Sapar
Swapnil is a dynamic Silicon Valley technology leader with over 15 years of success in architecting scalable solutions and driving technological innovation. Notably contributed to flagship products at organizations like PayPal, enhancing API infrastructure and developer productivity. He's passionate about leveraging microservices, API platforms, and cloud services to drive business success. He's recognized for outstanding cross-functional collaboration, communication skills, and contributions to the broader technology community through conference presentations, case studies, and blogs.
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