Hi, I'm Nick, and I have been in the Writing Team at Vonage since mid-May 2021. I am looking forward to getting through the onboarding and being able to contribute. I've been doing much learning about the Vonage agile-based Docs as Code pipeline, with more to come!

I was born in the county of Yorkshire in the United Kingdom and currently live in a village in Sussex. My dad was in the Royal Air Force, so we did a lot of moving between RAF bases in the UK and several countries.

My hobbies have always included sport, chess, swimming, etc. After a gap of many years, I'm now playing for the local Cricketers. I think the talented author Bill Bryson once said cricket was a game of mystery and food breaks. I also play badminton and table tennis in a village club I help to run. As a Parish Councillor, I find myself busier than ever, working on local community enterprise and issues. Parish councils are the local version of city, town and county councils, but we don't get paid.

My first career was as a scientist, which ended when I was Head of the Hazardous Waste Unit in London, so I decided to go into IT. My first IT post was as a Junior Consultant, after which I was a C/C++ programmer, IT Manager, Technical Writer, Trainer, and dabbled in several other areas, including relational databases.

During my early IT days, I decided to work in the Information part of IT. In my opinion, Technology is always changing, but the information, business or technical, is much the same but needed care and attention.

After a few years as an employee, I decided to become a Consultant/Contractor. I felt I could offer my Technical Writing, Training, Policy/Process/Procedure and technical skills to interested clients whilst boosting my knowledge of IT and business. I must have done OK; my clients included Intel, American Express, WorldPay, Coca-Cola, UNAIDS, Unilever, Accenture, and many others. I specialised in small to medium contracts with fixed date deliverables. One five day job was to create a large Technical Guide from scratch and training a Junior Technical Writer to take over the entire document process. With another client, I did an 18-month knowledge capture of a huge pensions system.

When Vonage contacted me to be an employee, I was not sure. But, after speaking with a few team members, it became obvious that this was an opportunity not to be lost. Good people, good company!

I hope to bring my wide experience to the Vonage table and enjoy getting to grips with the latest lean technology for document management or Docs as Code. Agile documentation has often been deployed as no documents. The reality is we need to record, collaborate and share knowledge, as opposed to losing it on hard drives or hiding it on local machines.

To the future! 🍸