Heston Hoffman
Senior Technical Writer at Datadog
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHeston Hoffman is a Senior Technical Writer based in Portland, Oregon with eight years of experience turning complex DevOps and infrastructure projects into clear, user-facing documentation. He has driven docs strategy and CI/CD tooling for Puppet’s open-source projects (including puppet, bolt, and puppet-docs) and now contributes to documentation workflows at Datadog. Comfortable working across DocOps, tooling, and content, he’s improved build processes, preview tooling, and precommit automation to streamline publishing and reviewer feedback. Heston’s background in ESL teaching and journalism gives him a knack for clear, audience-focused writing and for mentoring teams on documentation practices. He’s an active open-source contributor who pairs hands-on edits (fixing anchors, restructuring TOCs, updating DITA outputs) with small automation improvements that reduce friction for engineers. Colleagues describe him as a tinkerer who blends technical fluency with editorial rigor to make documentation both accurate and usable.
7 years of coding experience
Master of Science (MS), Professional/Technical Writing, Master of Science (MS), Professional/Technical Writing at Portland State UniversityUniversity of Pretoria
Afrikaans, English
Github Skills (22)
markdown10
github-ci10
puppeteer10
puppet10
technical-writing10
bolt10
automation10
markdown-it10
automations10
githubaction-workflow10
documentation10
python9
pandoc9
facter8
bash8
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
puppetlabs/bolt
Sep 2019 - Mar 2022
Bolt is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow. It can be installed on your local workstation and connects directly to remote nodes with SSH or WinRM, so you are not required to install any agent software.
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:410 reviews, 101 commits, 124 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Heston primarily contributed to the project's documentation. Their work included updating the Bolt documentation, fixing broken links, improving formatting, and adding new sections, such as those related to project directories, transport configurations, and privilege escalation. They also corrected terminology and updated the documentation for the latest version of Bolt, and organized the documentation structure. The focus was on improving the clarity, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of the project's documentation.
workstationautomatessshbasistakes
puppetlabs/puppet-docs
Mar 2019 - Nov 2021
Curated Puppet Documentation
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:1 release, 6 reviews, 87 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Heston primarily contributed to the repository by updating documentation. Their commits focused on modifying table of contents files to include new entries, as well as restructuring and updating documentation related to Facter and Puppet commands. Additionally, the user adapted the documentation to work with DITA and made corrections to anchor links, demonstrating a focus on the documentation build process.
puppet
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