Meet Fiona Grace Smith
Dyalog is pleased to welcome Fiona – better known as Fi – as our new Documentation Manager. It's characteristic for a growing software development company that at some stage the documentation load becomes so comprehensive that a structured, and fast typing personality, with great sense of humour, overview and time management skills is needed. We have certainly been lucky in finding Fi.
Fi has a PhD in 'Modelling the Continuous Cooling Transformation Diagrams of Steels' from Cambridge University. She also has a BA (Hons) Engineering and an MEng from Cambridge. During her course of degrees Fi also had to learn to master Pascal and FORTRAN.
Bringing vast experience to the Dyalog role as Documentation Manager Fi joined Dyalog from Comptel Corporation, where she was Senior Documentation specialist. In 2012 Fi was selected to document a new product; designing a new documentation set with an appropriate structure and organised content – which is always a challenge. In addition to working on the documentation, Fi also established and maintained standards, processes and best practices for the documentation team and acted as Scrum Master for the U.K. development team since they introduced agile methodology, to manage their schedule and workloads.
Prior to that, Fi worked with Convergys as Senior Associate and was responsible for their Tech writing.
Upon joining Dyalog Fi said, "The important thing for me in my role as Documentation Manager at Dyalog is to develop good relationships with developers, and I enjoy exploring beneath the surface of the product. In my previous jobs my technical proficiencies have been to my advantage as they have enabled me to introduce improvements in the content of the documents generated. The main challenge right now is to learn Dyalog APL – so I have been busy on www.TryAPL.org and working my way through Mastering Dyalog APL, which is an excellent book to work with when getting to grips with the many things you can do with the Dyalog APL language. APL is much more interesting than any previous work I have done as it's more my field of interest. However, eventually I will be responsible for all customer-facing Dyalog documentation.
"I was fortunate that a job that's so perfect for me became available in Bramley. I originally moved to Bramley from Cambridge 4.5 years ago so that I could be nearer my niece and nephew and see them growing up. As I don't have children of my own, being an aunt is lovely. Lots of play and excuses to do things that might otherwise be considered inappropriate for a 'grown woman' and none of the parental responsibility. Great fun!"
If you want to contact Fi directly her e-mail address is: fiona@dyalog.com.