Catalyst is very excited to announce that we have hired Nancy Amandi as a technical writer for PUDL’s Google Season of Docs project (full proposal here). The project will run from June through October, during which time Nancy will work on improving our documentation to make it easier for PUDL users to navigate and find the data they need.
Currently, it’s difficult for new (and long-time) PUDL users and contributors to quickly jump in and start using PUDL because our documentation is extensive and spread out between multiple repositories and websites. We have a data dictionary page in our docs, a Datasette deployment for exploring the data, and a set of example notebooks hosted on Kaggle, but none do a particularly good job of shepherding users to the data they want. The goal of this project is to create a better, more nested, system of table/column documentation so users aren’t overwhelmed by PUDL and know where to find the latest versions of the tables that are most relevant to them!
If you’ve ever struggled to navigate the PUDL docs and have feedback, please send an email to hello@catalyst.coop, and we will incorporate suggestions into our plan for the project.
About Nancy
Nancy is a data engineer and technical writer living in Nigeria. She’s passionate about helping data-driven businesses write clear, concise documentation to convey complex technical concepts to a diverse range of audiences. In addition to her writing, Nancy has extensive experience in creating scalable data pipelines, exhaustive data mining, explanatory datasets, analytical models, and business reporting solutions with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. In 2023, Nancy and her team members won the Nigeria Energy Forum Tertiary Institutions Energy Pitch Challenge for their work on OneGrid Energies, a clean tech startup working towards closing the energy affordability gap in Nigeria.