Writing samples

These are short excerpts from work across my career, grouped by type and ordered roughly with what I find most interesting first. Each links to a page with more context and a longer excerpt. Most of it is old enough to be outdated, and none of it is sensitive.

For book-length work, see also my Books.

Working with AI agents

• Directing AI coding agents — the instructions and hand-off notes I write to steer AI agents on a real personal project. Shows how I brief a collaborator and carry work across sessions.

Documentation

• Chainguard Custom Assembly: overview — product documentation for a Chainguard container tool. Markdown for a Hugo site, 2025.
• Get notified when a metric crosses a threshold — a task-based how-to from Grafana. Markdown for a React site.
• Contributing to Keycloak — a contributor guide in AsciiDoc for a Red Hat/Maven project, included to show a different source format.

For current API reference work, see the Chainguard API specification.

Technical marketing and thought leadership

• The Grateful Dead as a precursor to Creative Commons licensing — a piece for OpenSource.com on how the band’s taping culture prefigured open licensing. Shows range and voice.
• How I monitor my OpenWrt router with Grafana Cloud — approachable technical marketing from Grafana.

Release notes

• StarTree release notes — product release notes for a StarTree version, in a terse, scannable format.

Books and long-form

• VMware Cookbook, Chapter 1 — a chapter excerpt from the O’Reilly title, written directly in DocBook XML. Shows long-form technical writing and a source format now rarely used.
• Humor and Moroccan Culture — an excerpt from my book on Moroccan culture, included to show non-technical prose.
• All of my books — the full list of books I have written and edited, with covers and links.

Want everything in one file? Download the full writing samples (ZIP). If you would like something specific to your work, email me at matthew@matthewhelmke.com and I will send relevant examples.