Ian Maddaus
Documentation Engineer
Portland, Maine, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIan Maddaus is a documentation engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in docs-as-code workflows, automating, auditing, testing, and releasing technical documentation. Based in Portland, Maine, he currently leads documentation engineering at Progress Chef after contributing technical writing across the Chef ecosystem, including prominent open-source projects like Chef Infra and InSpec. Ian focuses on practical clarity—renaming product references, correcting APIs and EULAs, pruning unused assets, and fixing links—to keep large documentation sets accurate and usable. He also writes style guidelines and trains teams to adopt the documentation system, bringing developer-oriented rigor to writer workflows. With an MFA and a background in ecology, he combines narrative craft and systems thinking to make complex infrastructure tooling easier to understand. A detail-oriented maintainer, he routinely surfaces subtle usability issues (broken links, deprecated configs, misplaced images) that improve long-term docs health.
11 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Science - BS, Ecology, Bachelor of Science - BS, Ecology at The Evergreen State CollegeMaster of Fine Arts - MFA, Master of Fine Arts - MFA at Montana State University-Bozeman
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (18)
markdown10
inspec10
qgis10
audit10
rs10
chef-client10
markdown-it10
chef-solo10
auditing10
documentation10
testing9
devops9
automation9
automations9
infrastructure8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
chef/chef-web-docs
May 2019 - Jan 2023
All The Documentation
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:729 reviews, 529 commits, 1995 PRs in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Ian contributed to the documentation for the Chef Infra Server API by updating product names, correcting errors in the EULA, and improving section heading links. They also updated knife_ssh.rst and knife_cookbook_site.rst to reflect current usage. Furthermore, the user deleted unused files and moved unused images to an image archive, indicating a focus on documentation upkeep and clarity.
chef-workstationhabitatinspecdevrelchef
inspec/inspec
Apr 2019 - Jan 2023
InSpec: Auditing and Testing Framework
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:206 reviews, 60 commits, 64 PRs in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily focused on updating and refining the project's documentation. Contributions include renaming the software name from InSpec to Chef InSpec, providing deprecation notes for Azure resource configurations, and correcting download links. They also updated the resource documentation and moved shortcodes from the chef-web-docs to the inspec repository.
testing-frameworkdevsecdevopsauditinspec
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