Mike Birnstiehl
Senior Technical Writer at Elastic
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Birnstiehl is a Senior Technical Writer based in Minneapolis with three years in the software industry and over a decade of hands-on documentation experience across education, enterprise, and developer tools. He specializes in Docs-as-Code workflows, Markdown, Agile processes, and traditional authoring tools like FrameMaker and Word, bringing a pragmatic blend of developer-friendly and publish-ready documentation. Mike has progressed through roles at SonarSource, Lightspeed Systems, and the Texas Education Agency before joining Elastic, showing an ability to adapt documentation practices to diverse products and teams. His background in English and a graduate certificate in Technical Communication underpin a clear, audience-focused approach that bridges technical accuracy and usability. Unusually for a writer, he has moved between product training and docs roles, giving him extra insight into how documentation supports adoption and learning in real-world deployments.
3 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Graduate Certificate, Technical Communication, Graduate Certificate, Technical Communication at Minnesota State University, MankatoBachelor’s Degree, English, Bachelor’s Degree, English at South Dakota State University
Github Skills (73)
css-in-js10
opentelemetry10
elasticsearch10
visualizations10
streaming10
logstash10
jruby10
observability10
java10
elastic-apm10
elastic10
transport10
kibana10
logging10
react10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
mdbirnstiehl/docs-content
Feb 2025 - Apr 2025
Elastic Documentation Content
Contributions:259 pushes, 22 branches in 1 month
mdbirnstiehl/observability-docs
Dec 2022 - Jan 2025
Elastic Observability Documentation
Contributions:335 pushes, 157 branches in 2 years 1 month
elasticobservabilityelasticsearchmetricsopentelemetry
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