tekom - conferences

Petra Herbst

  • viesure innovation center gmbh
  • Graz
  •  Petra Herbst

Vita

During the last years of my studies of transcultural communication, I created a paid terminology database at Hyperwave software for my diploma thesis and then started working there as translation coordinator and soon after also as technical writer. 

Nine years later, I was offered a unique opportunity as head of department at Unycom software to create a documentation stack from scratch where I could not only select my team, but also the tools and processes for writing the docs such as online help and Administrators guides.

Then in 2016, I got a call from my former boss (Hyperwave) to start as coordinator for technical documentation at Bearing Point and there, I began to automate docs on a large scale using Asciidoctor in combination with Jenkins automation.

In 2019, I was offered another exceptional job at Travis CI where I worked exclusively with docs-as-code on GitHub in combination with Markdown files and Jekyll. 

Then finally in 2020, I started working at a corporate startup aka innovation center in Vienna where I was hired for my expertise in docsa-as-code and API documentation. Since starting there, I could try out many different tools and ways of writing docs. I created a Developer Portal for accessing API documentation by using state-of-the-art technology such as Google Apigee, redocly and GitLab.

In parallel, I've worked as a lecturer at FH Joanneum Graz (in the field of technical documentation and docs-as-code and just did a hands-on workshop in November 2022 using GitHub and the readthedocs.io tutorial so that the students do not only hear the theory about docs-as-code, but experience on how to work with them.