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

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

December 11, 2020 3 min

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

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.