Projects

User Guide

This document was the result of a college course I took in software documentation. For our final assignment we had to document a software application. I chose to document the open source software, Yum!, which was a Mac compatible application for organizing recipes. I added an additional component to my project, in that I wrote the user guide with a specific audience in mind: the PKU community, of which I am part. PKU is a metabolic disease that requires a person to follow a low protein diet otherwise the amino acid phenylalanine builds up in their bloodstream and acts as a toxin. For those of us with PKU, we often rely on baking and cooking our own foods, so we use lots of recipes. I loved that I could document an application for such a specific audience because it made the assignment more personal and challenging.

Tools: Microsoft Word and Gnu Impage Manipulation Program

Simple Instructions

Tools: Microsoft Word

I crafted this to document a process for using the DITA-OT (DITA Open Toolkit) on a local machine to create PDF outputs from DITA XML content. It was a simple process, but one that I kept forgetting because I would work on these builds for a while then need to set them aside and come back to them, and each time I would have re-learn this process. I also knew these would be useful for other writers on the team who needed to learn how to perform DITA-OT builds on their local machines.

Presentation

Tools: Prezi

When I first started the MLIS program at San Jose State University, I applied for one of the departmental scholarships. The guidelines for the scholarship were to produce a presentation of some sort that indicated what skills you already have and what you hoped to gain from the program. This Prezi presentation is what I submitted, and I was awarded one of the scholarships.