Ed Bacher/Bean Road Communications


I am a writer, software developer, teacher, and (a bad, but improving) disc golfer (See Notes from Bogeyland). This is my personal web site, highlighting some of the things I've worked on, including technical writing and tools. For a more detailed professional summary, see my resume or my LinkedIn profile.

Docs to Markdown add-on

Docs to Markdown is a Google Docs add-on that I created and maintain. It converts Google Docs quickly to simple, readable Markdown or HTML for web publishing. You can install it here: Docs to Markdown installation page. See the Docs to Markdown wiki on GitHub for more information as well as the source code.

As of October, 2023, Docs to Markdown is installed for more than 1 million users. Each week, there are more than 200,000 unique users and more than 3 million executions!

Google

At Google, I wrote internal documentation and educational content for Search developers. I was a member of the g3doc platform team (g3doc is a Markdown-based docs-as-code platform used for all internal technical documentation at Google). In addition, I created and maintained a number of other popular tools for writers. I also led the team that developed the internal class now available outside Google as Technical Writing Two.

savaJe Technologies

I worked at savaJe Technologies, a startup where I developed both software and documentation. savaJe created the first smartphone OS to run standard Java on a mobile device. I wrote the first version of the Java ClassLoader for the savaJe OS. Here is an early version of the documentation:

Bell Labs/Inferno OS

Before savaJe, I worked on the Inferno team at Bell Labs, writing both software and documentation. Inferno OS is a distributed operating system that came from the Computing Sciences Research group at Bell Labs, the same group that created the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems. I wrote a protocol debugger called styxview for the distributed file protocol Styx. Here is a FAQ that I created with Phillip Stanley Marbell, who was an intern from Rutgers at the time (he is now a lecturer on the internet of things at Cambridge):

Bean Road cookbook

Check out https://beanroad.com/cookbook/ for some good recipes from the Bacher family and friends.

Bean Road blog

See Bean Road blog for occasional photographs and musings.