Hello, I'm Ayu Adiati.

I'm a technical writer and open source documentation lead, based in the Netherlands. I run the documentation and education teams at Mautic and Virtual Coffee, and I co-maintain Open Source Communities. Most days, I do the same thing in different forms: I make complicated topics easy to understand. In docs. In pull request reviews. In community calls, when someone is stuck and just needs a clear next step.

I came to tech as a self-taught frontend developer. I stayed for the documentation. Not because it's easier than code, but because it's the part that turns "I have no idea what's happening" into "oh, that makes sense." That felt like the most rewarding work I could do.

I wrote the Virtual Coffee Community Handbook, ran Hacktoberfest, directed release docs, and received the Mautician of the Year (2025) award . All of it points to the same goal: making tech accessible. I believe in non-code and low-code contributions, too. Testing, documentation, and community care keep a project alive, just as much as code does.

This site is proof, not a pitch. My open source portfolio pulls straight from my GitHub activity and updates on its own, because non-code work deserves a visible, verifiable record too.

How I got here

I didn't start in tech. But every step along the way gave me something useful for open source leadership:

• Training & Development — Teaching people taught me where learners get stuck. It also proved that clear writing is a learned skill, not a personality trait. I still do the same work now, just with contributor guides instead of classrooms.
• Account Management — Listening closely to a client and listening to a confused contributor take the same skill. It's how I bring developers, product folks, marketers, and volunteers from different time zones onto the same page.
• Code of Conduct Responder — I moderated with care for three years at The Collab Lab. It taught me to stay calm in hard moments. That's the real reason I know how to build spaces where developers feel safe enough to stick around.

Off the keyboard

When I'm not reviewing contributions or updating guides, you'll usually find me behind a camera, keeping a bullet journal, or holding a glass of iced coffee.

They shape how I work, too. Bullet journaling taught me that a good system beats a good memory. Indexes, trackers, and honest logs are the foundation of how I organize docs, and how this site is designed. Photography taught me how to frame: decide what matters, crop out the noise, caption what remains. If this site feels like a well-kept journal, that's on purpose.

What I can help with

• Technical Writing & Docs Architecture — Building style guides and versioned docs programs for growing products, ensuring documentation holds up as a project scales, not just how it reads on day one.
• Code Review & Contributor Mentoring — Guiding first-time contributors from a confusing issue to a merged PR, knowing where people get stuck, when to guide, and when to step in to get things over the finish line.
• Docs Leadership & Strategy — Leading documentation teams through growth, turnover, and constraints, building docs programs that sustain beyond one person.
• Community Programs & Workshops — Running initiatives like Hacktoberfest and contributor programs, focusing on what actually keeps volunteers coming back rather than just short-term publicity.
• Long-Form & Tutorial Writing — Translating complex technical concepts into clear, step-by-step guides, drawing from my experience as a self-taught frontend developer to write for readers at every skill level.

Day to day, my toolbox is Git, GitHub, Docusaurus, Sphinx, Vale, Markdown, MDX, and RST.