Meet the Team¶
Our conference is organized by a dedicated team, many of whom are volunteers and give their time to bring the community together around documentation! This page outlines these folks and what their roles are.
Eric Holscher (he/him)¶
Conference Chair¶
Eric is one of the co-founders of Write the Docs, and also one of the co-founders of the Read the Docs documentation platform. He is the primary chair of the Portland conference, and loves to talk all things docs.
Sam Wright (he/him)¶
Stage Manager¶
Sam writes docs for developers. He is into making computers do the boring bits of writing so he can work on the fun bits. Sam has been organizing Write the Docs conferences for more than a few years now. He lives in Berlin unless he’s off to a conference or death metal festival somewhere.
Katie Janovec (she/her)¶
Executive Producer¶
Katie Janovec is an Event Producer and Project Manager based in Portland, Oregon. She enjoys organizing a variety of events, including conferences, galas, dance and music events, motorcycle shows, beer competitions, sports events, and more. Katie is excited to collaborate with the Write the Docs team for her second year at the conference.
Alicia Lewis (she/her)¶
Welcome Wagon Coordinator¶
Alicia loves to explain complex things in easy-to-understand ways and is passionate about harnessing the talent and collaborative spirit of others. She is currently Principal Technical Writer at Digi International, Inc., where she works closely (and remotely) with her internationally distributed development teams to document embedded Linux systems. She tends to be a human common denominator, bridging personalities and differences to bring people together.
Brooke Wayne (she/her)¶
Welcome Wagon Coordinator¶
Brooke, also known as Batman, is a long time attendee of Write the Docs in Portland, and a first time volunteer. Hailing from Toronto, Ontario in Canada, Brooke works at FreshBooks in a documentarian role she created on her own. When Brooke’s not writing, she’s playing competitive dodgeball, reading voraciously, or camping in the backcountry.
David Bastedo (he/him)¶
Welcome Wagon Coordinator¶
David is a support operations program manager based in Portland, Oregon. He works with support knowledge bases, documentation analytics, and customer help centers. David has attended Write the Docs since 2016 and has been a part of the Welcome Wagon since 2019.
Janine Chan (she/her)¶
Emcee¶
Janine is a documentation nerd up in Canada. She feels so lucky to emcee at Write the Docs so she can nerd out in Portland too! She spends her time putting a lot of effort into complex documentation and making it look like it was easy all along, advocating for concrete actions to improve diversity, running unimpressive distances, hiking, and knitting. Her cat remains staunchly uninterested in all of this.
Jerome Villegas (he/him)¶
Emcee¶
Jerome is a lifelong learner and Seattle native. He’s a technical writer, developer advocate, and content strategist and has been the organizer for the Seattle Meetup group since 2020. You’ll find him chipping away at one of his many interests—most commonly cooking, basketball, yoga, and the occasional music itch.
Jodie Putrino (she/her)¶
Lightning Talks Coordinator, Stage Support¶
Jodie manages the DocOps team at NGINX, where she led the adoption of docs-as-code methodologies and is a fierce advocate for documentation. Outside of work and the wild world of conference organization, Jodie can be found playing in the Colorado mountains, making tasty food, or enjoying live music with her family. She is excited to be joining the organizer team for the first time this year.
Mo Nishiyama¶
Welcome Wagon Coordinator, Social Media Coordinator¶
Mo Nishiyama is a Technical Writer at Oregon Health & Science University’s Information Technology Group. His professional passions include transforming dense engineer-speak into customer-friendly support articles, cultivating a community of tech writers in the workplace, promoting a human-centric work culture, and sharing career/life experiences through public speaking and essay writing. Mo is an Oxford comma advocate.
Rose Williams¶
Writing Day Coordinator¶
Rose is a documentation advocate, Meetup organizer, and Write the Docs community board member. She currently resides in Florida. She has had the pleasure of organizing WTD Meetup groups up and down the east and west coasts due to her frequent moves. Her board position focuses on supporting Meetup organizers and their events.
Joe Meersman (he/him)¶
Unconference Coordinator¶
Joe has been a Designer, Researcher, Principal, Manager, and Director of Design. He is currently a Partner at The Collective and has been an Adjunct Professor at UT Austin for over five years, teaching Visual Communication, Research, and Prototyping. He presents at conferences on topics ranging from Design Thinking, User Experience, Artificial Intelligence, and Creative Career Paths. He loves knowing “Texas” is a slang term for “Crazy” in Norway.
Sasha Romijn (she/her)¶
Grant Coordinator¶
Sasha is an independent developer and community organiser, mainly working on Python projects, many of them relating to internet routing. She has organised various conferences, first joining the Write the Docs organising team in 2017. Among other things, she works on support tickets, the website, and is chair of the Atlantic conference.
Mikey Ariel (she/her)¶
Brand Coordinator¶
Mikey is one of the original Write the Docs Prague conference organizers, and since the beginning of 2023 she has been serving as the chairperson of the global community board. She is an avid singer as well as a dancer, and has probably traveled across more of Europe than you have. Mikey is a content strategist and former technical writer at Red Hat, living in Prague.
Get involved¶
You can further read descriptions of all the roles in our Event Roles doc.
Interested in being a part of the future team or volunteering? Email us at portland@writethedocs.org.
