Gary Etzel

Background

About Gary Etzel

As a technical writer, I have spent my career working in a number of different industries on both hardware and software documentation. I began as a technical editor and marketing writer supporting the US Army's chemical weapons disposal program. Later, I wrote service documentation for a major gasoline pump manufacturer, and then software and hardware documentation as a consultant to a major printing company. For 13 years, I managed the Technical Communications department at DNV and I currently work as a Principal Technical Writer. My team and I are responsible for all user documentation for many of DNV's industry-leading software products, including Synergi Gas, Synergi Water, Synergi Pipeline, and Synergi Pipeline Simulator. Our documentation includes Online Help, User Guides, Installation Guides, Release Notes, and Training Manuals. At DNV, we have embraced the "technical" in Technical Communications. I built a customized structured authoring environment that allowed my department to focus on content over format. With our proprietary Sourcerer plugin, we pioneered the use of structured FrameMaker to write conditionalized documentation. Our process evolved to take advantage of a numerous advanced technical writing tools and plugins. Our FrameSLT node wizard scripts allowed us to reuse content throughout our documentation. And our AutoIt scripts allowed us to build our help files on a nightly basis, providing daily documentation updates for our software product builds. Over the last several years I led the development a completely new technical writing process and supporting templates using MadCap Flare to develop HTML-based Online Help files that can be deployed in the cloud, working in both TFS and ADO development environments. More recently I have been creating online training videos and eLearning courses using programs like TechSmith Camtasia and Articulate 360. I firmly believe that user documentation is every bit as important as the software product, and technical writers are every bit as important as the software developers. Documentation does not support the product; documentation is the product, just as much as the code itself. Therefore, it is our responsibility to be fully engaged in the entire software development lifecycle, from product inception to release.