My name is Doug Manis, I am a technical writer in the Seattle area with over 20 years experience producing technical documents. My speciality is REST interfaces, but I also write user guides, installation guides, field notes, release notes, and other product documentation.
I am available to write your documents. Contact me at:
This is an API reference for the Flexigift gift card management service, a fictional product that allows users to spend their third-party gift cards directly at their Amazon.com shopping carts.
The following sample is from a larger specification for a REST API to manage a fleet of commercial vehicles. It is a companion document to the Admin Portal User Guide example below.
Help Desk service chapter (PDF)
The following samples are from a larger User Guide for a cloud based UI to manage fleets of commercial vehicles. Fleet operators use the service to update vehicle software, gather driving behavior, and inspect a given vehicle’s health status and software versions.
Help Desk chapter (PDF)
This sample describes a Help Desk feature that reports the health and configuration of a given vehicle. Field support staff use the Help Desk to investigate troubled vehicles. To get the screen prints for this chapter I set up an account on a staging server and used Postman to inject the data that suited my needs. I logged a couple of bugs along the way. I sent my draft out to the sprint team for a technical review, applied the feedback, converted the final version to PDF and delivered it to the customer.
Software Package Format appendix (PDF)
When a new software version is available for a vehicle, a fleet operator uploads a software package to the fleet management system. This sample describes the very specific format that the software package must match. The test data for this section was complex; the values not only needed to be valid, they also needed to relate to each other in a realistic way that would return results that made sense. I needed several attempts before I had my data set up the way I liked it. The source document was written and reviewed in Word before finally being converted to PDF and delivered to the customer.