Meet the Grafana Labs team: Diana Payton, Senior Technical Writer

As Grafana Labs continues to grow, we’d like you to get to know our team members. Check out the latest of our Friday team profiles.

Meet Diana!

Name: Diana Payton

Senior Technical Writer Diana Payton

What’s your current location/time zone?

West Coast of North America.

What do you do at Grafana Labs?

I’m a Senior Technical Writer, which means I work to write and improve the technical documentation. When I started a little over a year ago, I was a lone writer. The team has expanded since then, which is exciting and gives me people who understand my obscure grammar jokes.

I joined Grafana Labs because I love the culture, the product, and the unfiltered access to the community. It feels like every day I learn something new.

What open source projects do you contribute to?

In the grand scheme of things, I’m an open source noob. I had just gotten started exploring it and looking for documentation opportunities to expand my developer documentation skills when I stumbled across Grafana and the opportunity with Grafana Labs opened up. For a while I was going through and adding periods to the end of sentences in the README documents of various projects. Inconsistent or missing punctuation is a pet peeve.

What are your GitHub and Twitter handles?

@oddlittlebird on GitHub. I do not Twitter.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I study martial arts, read books, write speculative fiction, knit, and play with my dog.

What’s your favorite new gadget or tech toy?

My Traveler Freewrite. It’s basically a keyboard and a hard drive, super portable writing tool!

What’s the best part of your job?

Solving communication problems. There is usually more than one “right” way to answer a question or solve a problem; I try to find the best way.

I also love that I am endlessly learning new things. And once I learn about something, I get to turn around and explain the thing to people by writing documentation about it. It’s endlessly gratifying, especially when we debut a cool new Grafana feature!

What’s your favorite food?

That’s not a fair question. I like so many foods! Blue cheese, seafood pasta, lasagna, cashew chicken, apricot lamb curry…the list goes on. My husband and I both enjoy cooking, especially Asian food, so we run a lot of interesting experiments in the kitchen. Our spice rack is overflowing with possibilities (and small jars).

What’s the last thing you binge-watched?

Picard. I want more Seven of Nine!

What’s your Zoom virtual background and why?

I don’t have one, because I got tired of my hands randomly disappearing when I gestured.