Resumé / CV

by Deirdre Straughan   

Deirdré Straughan

LinkedIn – email – Twitter

Skills

Reflections on My Career Strengths

Professional Experience

SmartOS Community Manager, Joyent

August, 2011 to present

Director of Technical Education, Joyent

Dec 2010 to July 2011

  • Designed and managed production and delivery of Joyent’s first technical training courses (internal and external)
  • Produced online video training for internal and external use
  • Streamed, publicized, and Tweeted live video of events such as nodecamp

Solaris Technical Content, Oracle Corporation

Feb-Nov 2010

Produced/managed production of technical content (video, white papers, web pages) about key Solaris technologies including storage, networking, and installation. Video samples here. Copyediting, technical review management, and marketing for the DTrace book.

Community Strategist and Social Media Producer, Sun Microsystems

Mar 2008-Feb 2010

As part of a small team within Sun’s Solaris engineering group, developed and executed strategies to encourage the growth and activity of OpenSolaris communities. This included acting as Secretary to the OpenSolaris Governing Board (2009-2010). Overall goal was to improve and increase communication between Sun engineers and our external developer/user communities; tasks included:

  • Devised and managed social media strategies to encourage Sun use of blogs, Twitter, etc. to promote and communicate about our technologies. Analysis and strategies for specific blogs led to increased posting and traffic. For example, translation led to page view increases of 200-2000% in China, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and Spanish-speaking countries.
  • Filmed, produced and published over 200 hours (300 items) of video on highly technical topics, garnering >180,000 total views (to 2010). Translation and subtitling increased global reach of these videos. Taught workshops to develop video skills among colleagues worldwide.
  • Social media production (video streaming, live tweeting) to increase global reach/participation in events.
  • Developed and managed technical content on websites, wikis, and blogs.
  • Planned and managed community events, including Sun’s Open Storage Summits, student events at ISC, Sun participation in OSCON, LISA, SNIA SDC and other conferences.
  • Constantly gathered and analyzed statistics to evaluate the effectiveness of all of the above.

Senior Web Producer, Sun Microsystems

2007 – 2008

Content development and management, blog management, web metrics and analysis, wikis, video, and web strategy for the Solaris Storage Software group.

Director of Customer Experience, TVBLOB Srl

2003-2007

Joining this startup at an early stage, I strove to create a unified customer experience across every aspect of the company, from software design to customer support and service. Responsibilities included:

  • Software interface and interaction design: Developed feature requests into step-by-step schematics of UI states and behaviors, worked with engineers to ensure correct and coherent implementation, worked with marketing and graphics team on graphic look-and-feel. Edited UI language directly in Java resource files (via Eclipse). Tested and refined usability, general testing.
  • Customer support process: designed custom web applications and SalesForce materials and processes to integrate with company’s custom back-end systems.
  • Managed, wrote, edited, and translated technical documentation for TVBLOB’s software and hardware. Provided technical input, copy editing, and translation for marketing and other materials.
  • Market research and monitoring: clipped 90+ blogs and other sources daily.

Freelance Projects

  • Software Manuals/Help: WinOnCD 5 Standard Edition and Power Edition, WinOnCD 6 all Editions (for Roxio). Work included UI reviews and suggestions for improvement.
  • Created Countries Beginning with I, and used it as a laboratory to learn about HTML, CSS, (later) WordPress, SEO, online advertising, etc. Applied this expertise to creating websites for clients.

Webmaster & Web Strategies Manager, Roxio

2000 – 2001

Roxio was spun off from Adaptec in May, 2001; see below.

Online Marketing and Customer Support Consultant, Adaptec

1995 – 2000

Created a unique online presence/community for the company and its software products (which for years shipped with many Windows installs), developing new tools and strategies for communicating with customers, with outstanding results in brand awareness and customer satisfaction and support. Activities included:

  • Initiated and moderated the Adaptec CD-R discussion list, a then-innovative approach to communications between a company and its customers.
  • Weekly newsletters launched in 1998, the largest list had 170,000 subscribers by 2001. These also encouraged reader responses and input – a pre-blogs example of online conversation between a company and its customers.
  • Monitored and responded in any online forums where our products were discussed. Eventually headed a small team which carried out these support activities.
  • For the Adaptec website, was solely responsible for all CD-R content: development and management of technical and marketing content, HTML, navigation design, information architecture. Managed an internal team and outside contractors. Designed and managed implementation of Web applications. This content brought in 70% of Adaptec’s overall website traffic.
  • All this moved to Roxio.com in November, 2000. I was part of the management team which chose and implemented ATG Dynamo as the application server and personalization platform, and Interwoven’s TeamSite for content management.
  • Had overall responsibility for content and community on Roxio.com, led the content and applications team which developed and launched the new Roxio site for the company spin-off in May, 2001.

Chief Technical Writer, Incat Systems

before 1995

Wrote the manuals and online help which helped make Easy CD the market-dominant, award-winning world leader in Windows CD-recording software, which led to Incat Systems being acquired by Adaptec in 1995.

Publications

Book: Publish Yourself on CD-ROM, co-authored with Fabrizio Caffarelli. A comprehensive guide to CD-ROM technology, for everyone from beginners to experts. Published by Random House Electronic Publishing, 1993. One of the world’s first books to include a CD-ROM, containing software and a hypertext version of the book. (Also desktop-published the book and created the hypertext, both using FrameMaker.)

Articles for Italian computer magazines (in Italian) and other publications.

Public Speaking

Education & Training

  • Solaris 10 System Administrator’s Training, Parts 1 & 2, Jan/Feb 2010
  • MBA, Open University (UK), 2004
  • Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Asian Studies and Hindi, University of Texas at Austin, 1987
  • Woodstock School, Mussoorie, India (high school), 1981

Languages

  • Native speaker of English
  • Read, write, and speak Italian fluently
  • Hindi/Urdu once fluent, could be revived

Volunteer Work

Personal

Live in San Francisco. LOVE to travel.

Twitter

 

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