This article is part of a series of articles focusing on SUSE Documentation and the minds that create the manuals, guides, quick starts, best practices and many more helpful documents. The content of this article has been contributed by Amrita Sakthivel, Senior Technical Writer at the SUSE Documentation Team.

Bonjour mes amis, I am Amrita. I am Indian by descent but an African by heart. My dad was a professor in Physics and Electronics, and he worked as an expatriate in Tanzania and Zambia, both well-known countries in Africa. I was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and brought up in Zambia.

We were a small family of a younger brother and I plus two Dobermans. Over the course of time, we had rabbits, Guinea pigs, cats, birds, and an unwanted snake.

Growing up as an introvert

My childhood and teen years have been in Zambia, and I was obviously influenced by the culture. I could speak Bemba, which is one of the 72 languages in Zambia. There was a small community of Indian people whom we used to meet on a regular basis for occasions.

I spent my entire teens trying to find my identity and blend in with societal expectations. In the process I lost the true essence of me. It is only when I read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a world that can stop talking by Susan Cain, I realized how important it is to be myself and, most importantly, to understand I am an introvert. I really identified with what I read and being authentic to myself.

I truly appreciate my upbringing I am a mix of both and very happy with that.

My true calling?

Growing up, I was not yet sure what I wanted to do. I ended up doing a Bachelor of Science in Land Economy. It was a five-year course and in the first year, I had to choose a specialization. Dad was keen on me doing Architecture but somehow, I struggled with layouts, diagrams etc. Thus, I chose Land Economy.

The path is never clear when one is a teenager. Post my degree, I went to India, Bangalore where I studied e-commerce. In 2000, it was a much in demand expertise and I ended up with a company named EASi, now known as Actalent. I worked there for one year. It was there that some colleagues recognized my flair for English and the written word. But at that point, I was not focused or serious.

Moving to the UK

Then I moved to the UK and lived there for five years. During my first year, I worked in a retail company, specifically on their Web site on sales and orders. Daily I used to take the train and tube to commute from East Ham to Central London. It was a great experience working with people from diverse backgrounds.

Writing is my true calling

Since my daughter was small, I worked as a freelancer for upwork.com mostly on content writing assignments.

Since my childhood I have been a voracious book reader and fascinated by complex words. I went into full time work as a content writer when my daughter was old enough.

During a research phase, I came across ‘real technical writing’ and the more I read I got hooked.  Thus, I decided to invest in a three-month tech writing course where I learnt all the ropes.

Introduction to Fedora, RHEL and OPEN SOURCE

The first time I heard about open source and Linux was when I joined Red Hat. I related so much to the principles of open source: collaboration, transparency, inclusive meritocracy and community. Being able to make a difference is what resonated with me. And Red Hat advocated open management principles and flat hierarchy.

As a technical writer, my platform was initially Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Then I switched to Fedora, and this was my first introduction to Linux projects and distros. Coming from a Windows background, using the bash shell was terrifying. But after three and half years of using it, I would never go back to Windows.

I worked on two products portfolios during my tenure; software defined storage and OpenShift Container platform – a platform to develop and build container applications.

My most notable achievement is contributing to the GA of the Agent Based Installer via documentation – and I was the only writer for the project. I learnt a lot from collaborating with the engineers, QE, product manager, content strategist, and all stakeholders.

One fine day I was contacted by a SUSE recruiter via LinkedIn. I was aware of SUSE before as well mainly because SUSE is Red Hat’s competitor in the Linux ecosystem. During the interview phase, I observed a lot of similarities between Red Hat and SUSE specifically as to open source and communities. I cleared the interviews and joined the SUSE documentation team at the beginning of March as a Senior Technical Writer for the products and solutions vertical for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. And it feels like being part of the team since ages 😃.

What does a technical writer do?

Speaking from my experience, my job is to document a feature, technology or solution from the user perspective, so I must be aware of the user audience that I am targeting.

I must understand the workflow of this feature, technology or solution and the optimal usage of it. I also test the technology to be described in a simulated environment, currently on a virtual machine via KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). Then I work on a draft content description. This is then reviewed by SMEs (Subject Matter Experts). And when my write-up is good to go, it finds its way into a guide, manual or article.

For my workflow I use:

• Bash Shell
• Git
• GitHub
• KVM
• VS-Code

My interests

I’m into art, specifically sketch notes as it’s very therapeutic. I listen to a mix of music and not any specific genre. I am a fan of Alan Walker and David Guetta. Growing up, I have been influenced by Snoop, Dr. Dre, Bon Jovi to name a few artists. I also like to read books and The fountainhead by Ayn Rand is an exceptional one. I am a cat lover and have a five-year-old Persian named Pluto. I am a mother to a teen, she’s 18 and getting into university in August.

I love to travel to experience different cultures and ways of living. I have been to Zambia, Thailand, the UK and Ireland. Next on my bucket list is Vietnam. One day I hope to travel to my birth country, Tanzania and explore countries like Egypt and Turkey.

The content of this article has been contributed by Jana Jaeger, Project Manager at the SUSE Documentation Team.

Most of the SUSE doc folks ended up on the team by happy accident. That is exactly what happened to me. Not to bore you with my bio too much, here are some (random) facts about what makes me tick. 

Pre-SUSE

For as long as I remember, I have been utterly fascinated by science. My earliest dream job was becoming an astronaut flying around in space doing all sorts of cool experiments. That dream was shattered pretty quickly when I witnessed the Challenger disaster on live TV.

Much to the horror of my parents, my next career plan focused on becoming an archeologist after my secondary school history teacher got me hooked on anything (pre-)historic. The probability of ending in a giant fireball somewhere between Earth and outer space is next to zero for archeologists, but so is the probability of making a living as an archeologist.

Once I started having biology and chemistry lessons in school, I discovered a new passion. I had excellent teachers who encouraged us to go for the behind-the-scenes aspects of things, to really dig deeper, to come up with our own theories and then successfully prove or disprove them. That got me hooked then and still does that to this day. Maybe no more in the field of biochemistry, though.

So, when I got my A-levels, it was really a question of choosing between archeology and biochemistry, and after a serious chat with a career counsellor, I moved to Kaiserslautern and studied Botany, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. These years will forever be the best of my life, including a three-month internship at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute of Polar Research.

I loved the field work, building my own experiments—hell, even the endless hours spent on a remote terminal connected to a VAXstation aligning DNA sequences.

When writing my diploma thesis, I encountered my first S.u.S.E distro ever (probably 6.1 or 6.2). Fiddling with LaTeX, gnuplot and xfig still took less time than what my mates spent on wrangling their MS Office or FrameMaker into submission. 

After that, I was pondering whether and where to begin a possible PhD when SUSE started looking for an editor for their fledging SUSE Linux Knowlegde Portal…

Early SUSE days

In October 2000, I joined the SUSE ranks as a portal editor for the SUSE Linux Knowledge Portal with no editorial experience at all. The following months are among the most stressful ones of my entire life. While my then boss, Frank Rennemann, worked furiously to get the software up and running, I had fun writing 3+ articles per week, translating some of them, and doing my own editing. For a few glorious months, we had great fun and enjoyed the overall enthusiastic reception of our work from the public and, after some initial skepticism, even from our SUSE colleagues. I loved researching topics, putting myself into our readers’ shoes, and tailoring our content to their needs. When the portal was discontinued in 2001, I had surely gained tons of writing and editing experience. Thanks to all folks at SUSE who put their faith in me then and really encouraged me to go for new challenges.

After a brief stint at Tanner AG where I met my friend and then and now colleague, Tanja Roth, I rejoined SUSE to spend the next 8 years writing for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM zSeries, and for what later became SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The next years were fantastic—writing and fighting alongside as part of the best team of writers in the world ;). 

Post-SUSE

When I left SUSE after my first maternity leave in 2009, I joined B1 Systems GmbH where I started out writing and editing training materials but ended up doing all sorts of things including (tech) writing and editing, marketing and graphics design, and project and event management. Not one day in all the twelve years at B1 Systems was boring, and I feel very proud to have been a part of their extraordinary team.

Current day

In Summer 21, I was offered to return to SUSE for the second time to serve as a Technical Project Manager for Documentation along with Tanja—and this is what I’ve been doing since November 1, 2021. It’s great to be back, it’s wonderful to catch up with all the things that have changed and developed into something far more complex than back in the old days.

Off-duty me

Most of my time off is devoted to sports activity (tell that to my fifth-grade PE teacher and he’d die of laughter and wouldn’t believe a single word). When my kids started taking Taekwondo classes, I was surprised to notice that I became increasingly envious of them. So, I took up Taekwondo as well. The early days were pretty hard because my motor skills and coordination resembled those of a panda bear on speed (sorry, pandas), but almost five years later I am still having fun and just got my first black belt. (more…)