Coding experience
I’ve dabbled in code throughout my career to feed my curiosity, add value, and translate developers’ language into high-quality content.
Here’s how I’ve used code to solve content problems:
- Created my first website in the 1990s.
- Wrote SQL queries to analyze hidden user metrics in a legacy help system.
- Converted a 1500-topic Adobe RoboHelp project to DITA XML.
- Developed custom XSLT transforms for DITA-to-HTML conversion.
- Built a unique publishing platform using Atlassian Confluence as a CMS with a custom front end.
- Created a Python script to help subject matter experts (SMEs) auto-fill homepage metadata.
- Automated repetitive team tasks through custom scripting.
- Designed and built contentcontent.info — a decade-long technical content aggregator — using Drupal CMS.
- Helped establish the Drupal CMS Northern NJ user group as a founding member.
- Built edmarsh.com from scratch using WordPress in 2008.
- Transformed edmarsh.com to run on a static site generator in 2025.
Agile and Jira
Agile is a software development methodology that features working on small tasks and deploying frequently. I have extensive experience with Jira and Agile:
- Defined user story guidelines that were adopted division-wide within three months of onboarding.
- Wrote user stories and epics following Gherkin language principles.
- Worked with Kanban and story boards.