Technical Documentation Internship

As a Technical Writing Intern on Tanium’s documentation team, I created real, customer-facing content for a cybersecurity and systems management company securing over 32 million endpoints worldwide. Working alongside a senior technical writing mentor, I contributed to a company-wide content migration from MadCap Flare to Heretto, updated user guides based on real Jira tickets, and completed an independent research project on an AI-driven workflow solution, which I presented to Tanium’s R&D team at the end of the internship. Because Tanium is a cybersecurity company, some specifics, like internal tools and the exact topic of my research project, aren’t included here.

Results

Impact

• Delivered content updates that shipped to production, including guide updates supporting a new confidence score feature and a set of Jump Gate improvements.
• Gained increasing autonomy over the internship, from working through a first ticket under close mentorship to communicating directly with developers on later projects.

Practicum Reports

Midterm Status Report

Final Status Report

Video Presentation

Work Products

Patch guide: troubleshooting update

Reference: Common Patch errors page: new section

• Wrote a new troubleshooting section for a Linux-specific Patch module error, filling a gap in existing documentation.
• Published to both cloud and on-premise guides.
• Marked my first hands-on introduction to Tanium’s authoring tool, during my first two weeks on the job.

Deploy guide: confidence score update

Overview page: Software package confidence score update

Managing software page: Create a software package updated step 7

• Updated the Deploy user guide to document a new confidence score feature.
• Researched the doc-impact across Slack, engineering repositories, and a test environment, since the ticket didn’t specify exactly what needed to change.
• Incorporated feedback from a developer and product manager before publishing.

Jump Gate guide: sprint updates

Jumping to endpoints page: Jump to an endpoint updated step 6

Approving jump requests and viewing activity page: updated session monitoring note

• Worked through an entire sprint board, rather than a single ticket, to identify a set of needed updates.
• Evaluated doc-impact across multiple features at once, rather than focusing on a single fix.
• Implemented and published the updates after incorporating feedback from a developer and product manager.

My Approach

Here’s how I approached the work throughout the internship:

• Learned Tanium’s authoring tools by working through a real ticket in my first two weeks, rather than starting with purely conceptual training.
• Built independence over time, moving from reviewing already-migrated content to migrating full guide sets on my own.
• Worked from ambiguous tickets and sprint boards by tracking down context across Slack, code repositories, and test environments before drafting.
• Incorporated feedback from both my mentor and relevant developers before publishing any content live.
• Took on any task given to me, staying willing to try new things and asking for help when I needed it.
• Approached every project as a learning opportunity, staying clear on expectations and communicating honestly with my mentor and manager about my progress.
• Shaped a technical presentation for a developer-heavy audience by drawing on technical communication coursework and storytelling techniques, culminating in a live demo for Tanium’s R&D team.