I am delighted to commend Kevin G. Lim for her work as a technical writer in the Google Enterprise Engineering development team in recognition of her exemplary skill and efforts. Kevin is professional, fiercely competent and a pleasure to work with. She shows strong personal initiative and her enthusiasm is infectious. She has also blessed us with her delightfully positive disposition. Best yet, she never preaches or berates but subtly charms and cajoles. Kevin is a valuable asset to the Enterprise group, not only for helping us to better understand and support the documentation mission, thereby making us a more effective team, but for showing extraordinary personal initiative in helping us to improve our UI and daunting body of on-line documentation on which the Enterprise search appliance vitally depends, thereby making our product more usable by our customers and ourselves. On the Enterprise Mini team, she has helped the engineers and program managers better understand the needs and constraints of the technical writer. Specifically, she has helped us all to be more effective in supporting documentation of new and existing features and in a more timely manner than previously. This is due, in part, to her keen ability to clarify for us the vagaries of scheduling constraints of the technical documentation team and how they interplay with our own often fluid internal development schedules, especially in the newly expanded area of international translation. By working closely with our program manager, she helped us negotiate this delicate interplay. Kevin has also shown extraordinary initiative, undertaking nothing short of a systematic and thorough audit of the entire corpus of on-line ``Help'' documents for the Google Mini (and, by extension, a majority of the Google GSA on-line documentation as well). This was a Herculean task but she executed it with good humor and aplomb as well as valuable technical insight and accuracy. The Google GSA/Mini are much improved products as a direct result of her diligent efforts. Consequently, this affects not only our customers and partners but our internal developers, testers and new hires as well since the on-line ``Help'' documents are the only detailed technical documentation we supply for the majority of product features. It is therefore vital to the success of the product that they be kept meticulously up to date so we don't look sloppy or foolish in the eyes of our customers. Her technical prowess and attention to detail have vastly improved how we perceive our own product. This is also a great morale booster. She also never hesitates to make subtle yet significant and insightful recommendations on how we might improve the user interface on which our customers and we depend. For context, all customer interactions with the Google Enterprise GSA/Mini go through a browser-based user interface. For them, and to large extent to our own developers as well, this user interface __is__ the product. To her credit, it was explicitly stated in last quarter's Enterprise retrospective that if an engineer is having difficulty documenting or devising a good user interface for a new feature, they should seek out Kevin Lim for some ``tech writer therapy''. Moreover, in order to coordinate this with the long lead-time for translation, Kevin exhibited an impressive ability to prioritize and triage a daunting task into manageable chunks. She silently but perceptibly identified and separated the critical components (like new features, undocumented old features or mis-documented features) from less vital issues (like awkward legacy wording or distracting grammatical foibles), making sure the former were polished in time for early translation while fixing the latter in passing as time permitted, all the while maintaining a sense of good humor and positive attitude. This took extraordinary effort, dedication and self-discipline but Kevin worked the miracle to make it happen. Finally, Kevin also cleverly gleaned how to play the system against itself by realizing that hard deadlines for translations had to be met aggressively while less critical ``mere polish'' could be slipped in later within the gap that inevitably opens as initial engineering target deadlines invariably slip a week or two before final freeze. This ingenious adaptation to the notorious fluidity of engineering schedules is truly masterful. It reflects not only Kevin's years of experience working with engineers but also highlights her creativity and extreme intelligence. Last but not least, Kevin has a delightful sense of humor and gentle disposition. She delicately balances professionalism and seriousness with a sense of fun and whimsy when appropriate, never compromising her genuine sincerity. This makes her an excellent liaison between the technical writers and us playful yet sometimes surly engineers. She's a good influence on all. Altogether, Kevin has become an integral part of the team and her spirit and many years of experience have made us all better, more effective engineers. Her efforts and mere presence has made Google Enterprise Engineering a better environment in which to work. She gets results and makes it fun along the way. Kevin G. Lim rocks! Sincerely and with much appreciation, Michael R. Blair or [http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~ziggy/cv.html] Enterprise Engineering intern - Summer and Fall 2006 MIT Ph.D. Candidate (All But Dissertation: June 2007 expected exit) [I've received a formal offer letter to return as a full-time employee (as a software engineer) once the doctoral dissertation is completed.] ------------ This is file: http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/ftpdir/users/ziggy/kevinlim.recommendation.text -------- See also: http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/ftpdir/users/ziggy/kevinlim.cover-letter.text