Starknet · Ethereum Layer 2
Role: Documentation Lead (Senior Technical Writer), StarkWare Engagement: September 2022 to November 2023 Product: Starknet, a ZK-rollup Layer 2 on Ethereum built on STARK proofs Remit: One of two writers. Sole owner of the open-source Starknet docs, through the testnet-to-mainnet transition
Starknet was moving from testnet to mainnet with a new programming language, a proof system most developers had never touched, and an ecosystem of teams waiting to build on it. I owned the developer-facing documentation and portal through that transition.
The Situation
The protocol was still being finalised while developers were already building against it. Cairo was changing, and so was its toolchain. Every question a developer had went to a core engineer, and core engineers were the scarcest resource in the organisation.
Scope
- The product loop for the docs. I prioritised against a constantly shifting protocol roadmap with core engineers and cryptographers, collected ecosystem feedback, and used analytics to decide what to build and fix: heatmaps, session capture, usability tests and A/B tests
- Content for a wide range of readers. Scalability trade-offs, system architecture, STARK proofs and smart-contract usage, for audiences from ZK researchers to dApp developers
- Cairo. I managed the rapid redesign of the Cairo language documentation as the language and toolchain changed
- Process and open source. Community pull requests, code review and merging, contribution guidelines, versioning and multi-language, docs-as-code and CI/CD for the docs site, and automation experiments
- Community and marketing. Community support and technical marketing with the DeFi and dApp teams building on Starknet. Meetups and conferences. I managed multiple external agencies to scope and budget
Decisions That Shaped It
Go to the source. I worked directly with cryptographers and protocol engineers. Holding the conversation without everything pre-digested meant better questions.
Ship against the protocol's timeline. Mainnet had a date. I published against what was decided and revised as things settled, which meant accepting that some pages would change twice.
Let analytics set the work. Heatmaps and session capture showed where readers got stuck. That decided what to fix first.
Working with research teams. Cryptography and protocol engineers are precise people working on hard problems. I do the homework first and arrive with a specific claim for them to correct.
Stakeholders
Core protocol engineers, cryptography researchers, the DeFi and dApp teams building on the network, external agencies, and marketing.
Why This Matters for Payments and Stablecoin Work
Layer 2 infrastructure and the economics of moving value on-chain are the ground stablecoin infrastructure is built on. I worked inside that technology, under launch pressure. Combined with the Mastercard tokenisation work, that covers card networks and on-chain settlement. I am domain-literate in both.
→ Mastercard MDES for the payments tokenisation contract → Role History for the dated record → Contact to discuss a role