Charles (Chuq) Von Rospach
Kitsap County, Washington
Phone number on request
http://www.chuq.me
NOTE: As of July, 2023 I have retired
and am not interested in a new position
Technical Writer and Online Content Creator: I am a writer with experience in both general/consumer audiences and technical developer groups. I can write for and manage your corporate blog, Twitter account or create new content for the web site while building relationships among the users of your community site. I can also write and produce videos for your YouTube channel or write, host and produce your podcasts. My technical background allows me to make very technical concepts accessible and understandable.
Community Manager/Community Design/Developer Relations/Advocacy: I’ve long been involved in building and managing online communities and can help a company improve its relations with its users or partners through their online communities. I have a strong interest in customer satisfaction, and have worked in both small organizations and large, global enterprise environments. I have a strong technical background as a programmer.
I love to bridge that gap between inside and outside or an organization, and help the business people and technical people understand each other and work together.
I am currently happily employed and not considering opportunities.
Manager, Technical Documentation, Farsight Security and DomainTools
December, 2017 to June, 2023: Managing a technical documentation group for a small startup in the computer security information field creating DNS related products. Also: only technical writer in the technical documentation group. Also: developer of the document rendering systems, which takes markdown input and outputs both HTML and PDF documentation on company products. Also Also: Administrator and content creator on an Atlassian Confluence system as well a primary support, teacher, and mentor to internal users. As of 2021 Farsight was bought by DomainTools and I continue in my role with the new merged company.
Sabbatical
March 2016 to December 2017: I took my long-delayed gap year to work on personal projects including my photography and birding. Also: catching up on my sleep, finally. Did lots of personal projects, volunteer work, and sleeping.
Developer Community Manager for DevNet, Cisco
April 2014 to February 2016: DevNet is Cisco’s developer portal, created to promote Cisco’s APIs and technologies, teach Cisco customers about its new virtualized networking and other environments, and to evangelize the new software-centric product philosophy that Cisco has adopted throughout the company
My role within DevNet was as the community manager with an emphasis on content creation and scheduling, interacting with the users of the portal and managing user created content and comments, being the primary owner of the Twitter account, YouTube channels and LinkedIn group, and acting as lead writer for the monthly newsletter.
I also worked on many other including organizing the technical program for Cisco Live in San Diego and assisting in the program in Berlin, editing and producing videos for Cisco Live in Milan as well as other video and writing projects. Other responsibilities included managing the relationship with the crowdsourcing coding contest vendor TopCoder and our sponsorship of the Engineering Deathmatch YouTube channel. I was also responsible for teaching members in the organization how to use and be comfortable on social media systems to help them learn how to work in public promoting Cisco and the DevNet programs.
Technical Community Manager, Infoblox
December 2011 to April 2014: I was hired to re-launch two neglected customer communities, and we defined a strategy to combined them and hired a developer team to migrate the content to Drupal and launched the merged community in six months. We then organized a complete graphic and structural redesign to bring the site branding to the current corporate standards. I acted as Product Manager and Architect for the community site, creating and managing the PRDs and design and working with the development team on implementation. I also did most of the site design and implementation wireframes and directed the consultants on implementation, as well as creating many of the final images used on the site.
Other responsibilities included managing the company blog and working with all of the company bloggers on scheduling and content creation, day to day operations and management of the site as well as creation of new content for it, including sample code tutorials for the company’s new REST API showing how to access them via Perl. I was working on a similar tutorial in Python when I left.
Other activities involved writing and producing screencasts and blog posts for the community, site analytics and analysis and working with others around the company to help them create content and get involved with social media surrounding company events and activities.
Developer Community Manager, Palm, Inc. (acquired by HP)
February 2009 to December 2011: I was the person responsible for communication between Palm Developer Relations and its external developer community. My role included communicating updates from Palm to developers, listening to developer feedback and communicating their concerns throughout the organization and helping to resolve developer problems that fell through the cracks.
I was also responsible for management of the online developer portal and administration of the developer forums, I managed the beta seeding programs, monitored the product reviews from users for inappropriate content, acted as the escalation point for developers for problem resolution, and managed the app review process prior to our staffing out that function. This role involved a lot of cross-functional work across many organizations and at all levels in Palm’s management.
Other responsibilities included writing and publishing the Palm Developer Blog, working with the Application Review team in the review and approval process, working with corporate security on leaks, legal on trademark and licensing, PR on release publicity materials and timing, and business development in setting and enforcing language and acceptable content standards in applications, the application catalog and application reviews.
Marketing Webmaster and Community Manager, Laszlo Systems
October 2007 to February 2009: Web developer and administrator for the company’s marketing and business Drupal web sites. Community Manager and administrator for the Open Source community working on the open source parts of the platform.
Also managed e-mail marketing efforts, analyzing and reporting on online analytics and trends to the company executives and advocating community needs and initiatives throughout the company.
Professional Services Architect, E-mail, StrongMail
November 2006 to June 2007: Architect for StrongMail’s professional service organization, helping customers integrate the StrongMail email system into their organizations and helping potential customers to understand the benefits of adopting the platform.
Included significant pre-sales and post-sales customer interaction, working with Professional Services engineers on project implementation, project and program management, acting as the customer evangelist within the company, and working with product marketing on new product features.
Apple Computer, Inc. (February 1989 to September 2006)
Lead Architect and Developer, Marketing E-mail: February 1996 to September 2006
Responsible for the design, implementation and operation of Apple’s marketing email systems world-wide, supporting 24 languages and delivering newsletters and direct marketing emails. Grew the system from 8 million emails the first quarter to 2 billion emails a quarter when I left the team. Led a team of 8 people in this project. My responsibilities included the design, project management and implementation of the system, and after launch, also acted as operations. Project acknowledged by the IS&T VP as the best ROI of any project in the organization.
Designed, implemented and managed Apple’s internal group email server and their external technical email list server (lists.apple.com), at the time the primary communication tool for apple developers. All systems built on LAMP software using PHP, Perl, Python and MySQL.
Webmaster/E-Mail list administrator, Server Marketing: May 1994 to February 1996
Implemented and managed the Web Server for the Apple Server Marketing team, responsible for both operations and content creation and management, using HTML, CSS and Javascript as well as server-side capabilities in PHP.
Implemented and managed the mailing list servers for Apple Server Marketing, supporting Apple’s first technical mailing lists and many other lists including Guy Kawasaki’s ‘EvangeList’.
Senior Technical Support Engineer, Direct Response Center: February 1989 to May 1994
Co-founded the Direct Response Center, Apple’s first paid technical support organization. Products supported included A/UX, Data Access Language, AppleSearch and various Enterprise and Networking products.
Tasks included phone support for developers, writing technical documentation, new product training on upcoming products and acting as an escalation point for junior support engineers.
Technical Support, System Administration, E-mail & NFS, Sun Microsystems
October 1986 to February 1989: Senior Technical Support engineer specializing in system administration, e-mail and NFS. Technical support of third party developers adopting NFS on their platforms.
Earlier industry experience October 1979 to January 1989: Details available on request
Selected Publications and Other Writing
Technical reviewer, Painting the Web (O’Reilly, 2008)
Contributing Editor, Macintosh Horizons
Contributing Editor, MacTech Publications
Publisher, OtherRealms (1986-1991, nominated for two Hugo Awards)
Book Reviewer, Amazing Stories
Published Science Fiction Author
Technologies and Tools
WordPress, Drupal, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, LAMP, Perl, PHP, Python, MySQL, Vbulletin, Jive, Confluence, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and dozens of other jargon keywords for you to ponder.