Vertica - Barry Rogoff
Barry Rogoff
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Vertica
Technical Writing
Vertica is a startup database management software company founded by Dr. Michael Stonebraker and Andrew Palmer. The column-oriented Vertica Analytic Database was designed to manage large, fast-growing volumes of data and to provide extremely fast query performance when used for data warehousing and other query-intensive applications.
When I joined the company, I was given two weeks to write a product overview document from scratch, based on a few early design documents and interviews with developers. The overview was intended to be presented to a major financial corporation that was a potential first customer. I finished the project on time and it was exactly what the founders were hoping for. It later became the Product Overview manual.
I designed and wrote the company's Version 1 and Version 2 documentation entirely on my own. I also designed and implemented an automated documentation build system that allowed the product developers and other internal users to review the documentation every 24 hours in order to provide immediate feedback. The internal documentation library page included all previous, current, and in-progress documentation sets.
The Vertica documentation was produced and distributed in PDF and HTML formats. The HTML files included a master table of contents, a master index, full-text search across the entire documentation set, and cross-reference links between all manuals (click the link below). I also produced context-sensitive online help for the DBA console application, contributed to the design of the company's website, and moderated the customer support forum.