About Alison

I spent 32 years at Oracle writing documentation for some of the most technically demanding enterprise software in the world. For the last 12 of those years, I was the sole documentation owner for Oracle Cloud Native Environment, a multi-component Kubernetes platform used by enterprise customers globally. I owned the documentation architecture end to end, worked directly with engineering through each release cycle, and tested features against live deployments. I left Oracle in October 2025 to build my own practice.

Since leaving Oracle, I’ve built an AI portfolio focused on areas I want to work in:

• Kubernetes Assistant: fine-tuning Llama 3.1 8B on 2,000 labelled examples covering YAML generation, kubectl commands, and error troubleshooting. The fine-tuned model scores 97% on the test set, against 73% for the base model.
• Oracle Cloud Native Environment Assistant: the same approach applied to Q&A pairs scraped from the Oracle Cloud Native Environment Release 2 documentation I spent 12 years writing.
• RAG CLI: a retrieval-augmented generation system for querying local documents, with four interfaces: CLI, REST API, web UI, and a native macOS desktop app.

All three are on the GitHub projects page with source code and documentation.

Oracle (1993–2025)

Consulting User Assistance Developer (2013–2025)

Oracle Cloud Native Environment is a multi-component Kubernetes deployment stack for enterprise customers. I was the sole technical writer for this product across all versions, which meant I owned the documentation architecture from the ground up, not just the writing.

I designed the complete documentation structure covering installation, configuration, administration, and reference content across multiple concurrent product versions. I used strict DITA XML content typing with maximum content reuse across shared components, and structured content for distinct user pathways: new users, those evaluating the product, experienced administrators, and customers upgrading from earlier versions.

I worked with engineering and QA throughout each development cycle to test features, identify gaps, and raise defects before release. I wrote Terraform and Ansible scripts to provision and validate my own test environments. Oracle Support later adopted those scripts for their own internal testing. All documentation was verified against live deployments, not specifications.

I also migrated the documentation source from DocBook XML and Subversion to DITA XML and Git, implementing a docs-as-code workflow that reduced publication overhead and improved version control. I mentored junior technical writers in DITA authoring and structured writing practices, and collaborated with the training team to produce tutorials consistent with the product documentation.

Earlier work in this role included documentation for Oracle OpenStack, Oracle VM, Oracle Linux Virtualisation Manager, and related open-source technologies including Podman, DTrace, Gluster Storage, and Ceph Storage.

Senior Technical Writer (1993–2013)

I produced documentation for Oracle Database and Oracle Applications across multiple release cycles, covering SQL*Plus, localisation features, and developer tools. I co-authored The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual, a practical guide for PHP developers integrating with Oracle Database. I presented technical sessions and ran hands-on training at Oracle OpenWorld and international PHP conferences in Germany and New York.

Education