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Writing Samples — Ben Goddard

Documentation engineering and information architecture work, 2020 to 2026.

I build the systems that produce documentation. Some of what follows is writing. More of it is the structure, tooling, and process underneath the writing, which is the part I care about and the part I get hired for.

Every sample states plainly whether I wrote it, directed it, or designed the system that produced it. Those are different claims and they should not be blurred.


Start here

If you have five minutes and you are hiring a Documentation Engineer:

  1. Building a documentation system, not writing documentation — a 20-stage AI-assisted pipeline, a full Diátaxis restructure, and a documentation MCP server. The site is public and you can check every claim against it.
  2. Documentation work intake automation — a 23-step automation that turned an untracked request queue into routed, acknowledged work.

If you are hiring an Information Architect:

  1. Documentation tooling UX research — survey research on an internal wiki, with a flaw in its own measurement scale named in the report.
  2. Consolidating two intake forms into one — field-by-field analysis with a recorded reason for every field kept, merged, or cut.
  3. Scoring documentation pages for freshness — content lifecycle triage, so maintenance goes where it matters.

Everything, by type

Systems and tooling

Sample What it shows My role
Documentation system at Forage AI-assisted pipeline, Diátaxis restructure, llms.txt, MCP server Directed and built the system
Work intake automation 23-step request-to-ticket automation Designed and built

Information architecture

Sample What it shows My role
Documentation tooling UX research Survey design, findability analysis, structural recommendations Wrote
Intake form consolidation Content modeling, field-level reasoning Analyzed and designed
Page freshness scoring Content lifecycle triage system Wrote and built
Documentation lifecycle model Process model with stage ownership Built

API reference

Published help center documentation. I wrote these.

Sample What it shows
Suspend or unsuspend a member Technical depth, user-facing and backend behavior together
Get company members Parameter tables and worked examples
Audit log examples Runnable examples, pagination

Style guide

Sample What it shows
Formatting keyboard shortcuts Rule-writing that survives many writers
Using graphics in documentation Screenshot conventions and accessibility, kept as a PDF because the images are the argument

On format

Some of these are Markdown and some are not, on purpose.

Where the words are the work, the sample is Markdown. Documentation belongs in source form: it diffs, it reviews, it ships from a repo.

Where the layout or the diagram carries the meaning, the original is kept. A style guide about using graphics with no graphics in it is not a style guide. Diagrams that were originally large collaborative canvases have been rebuilt as Mermaid, so they are readable as source and render in the browser rather than being a picture of a decision.

Original source files are in assets/.


Related

context-engineering-toolkit — the working tools: a documentation pipeline, style guides, and the architecture patterns behind them. That repo is the system. This one is the output and the reasoning.


A note on redaction

Former employers appear here by name where the work is already public. Where it was internal, colleague names, customer identities, internal channels, and product names have been removed. The reasoning and structure are unchanged.

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Documentation engineering and information architecture work samples, 2020-2026

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