Accolades

Letters of recommendation

Email kudos

Janick Bergeron, CTO of Qualis, sends this email describing our working together preparing his textbook, Writing Testbenches - Functional Verification of HDL Models:

Here is an excerpt from a recent review about my book on Amazon.com:
"I found this books extremely well written in terms of technical content and style. Yes, style. The words are efficient and almost leap off the page to convey the author's intent."

This praise goes entirely to Kyle. Through many beatings about using short sentences, avoiding pronouns, keeping paragraphs to a single topic, using font styles judiciously instead of numbered headings, having a fit over nested paranthesis, being consistent in terminology, maintaining a logical flow, and a lot of red and purple ink from her ruthless pens, she has helped make a much better book than I otherwise would have. You know how frustrating it is to have a customer insist on doing things the way you know is not the best and if only they'd let you do your job. Well, I'm glad I let Kyle do her job.

John Cooley (jcooley@world.std.com), a well-known commentator on electronic design automation industry activities, emails his reaction to a submission from Peet James (a Qualis Principal Engineer) that describes the DAC 2001 conference:

wow, you cleaned up peet's notoriously bad grammar, kyle! thanks!

Knowing that his spelling tends to be creative, Peet has changed the spelling of his own name.

From Andy Betts, GM of Qualis Europe, in response to our completion of the Careers pages on the corporate web site:

Kyle, Great job! You must have been taking lessons from Santa in order to have finished it all in that time!! Many Thanks & Merry Christmas! Andy

From Don Guiou, COO at Qualis Design, in response to our web site maintenance work:

Kyle, Just a note to let you know that it is a pleasure to work with a professional like you. I am a big believer in "say what you will do, do what you say". You do a great job at both. Thanks. Don

From John Krause, Senior Engineer at Qualis, about our developmental edit of his customized presentation for a client:

Thanks for the quick response in commenting. I like the comment of keep doing, stop doing, and start doing. I was presenting some implicitly in the slides, and leaving out areas where they should "keep doing". I like the explicitness you imply. I will add slides on the end (I want to keep as many of these slides reusable as possible) that give explicit lists of items for each of these categories, with examples from their code as much as possible. Great idea; thanks. John

From Peet James, Principal Engineer at Qualis, after receiving another Best Paper award for his presentation at SNUG:

Thanks Again for all your help with the paper. I was telling some of my other author friends here about my trade secret (kyle the tech writer). Bragging about how easy it is to write a paper with someone who can cross all the t's and dot all the i's so well. You make writing a paper smooth and fun. you are appreciated, Peet

Janick
Bergeron

From Janick Bergeron, CTO at Qualis, on our developmental edit on his new book about using [tool], a hardware verification environment from [company xyz]:

Thanks Kyle. I *really* like the levels of your comments. It is exactly the type of feedback I'm looking for at this point. The line editing is not really important... And you are 100% right.

My original message:

I'll leave the line-by-line edits for another time...

I like your promise in the Preface that you'll not simply regurgitate the syntax and tips presented in [company xyz]'s docs. Instead, your plan is to offer real-world usability information. This approach targets value-add. It echoes the task-oriented rather than command-oriented approach of many of the doc books I've written.

However, in reading your TOC, I'm concerned that you may not fulfill your promise. Generation and Constraints, Events and Temporals, Functional coverage? No, no, no. The user/reader doesn't think in these terms. They care about setting up their simulations, working w/ time, and ensuring features are tested.

Map your chapter titles to the key steps in verifying a design. Order them in the way that optimizes using [tool]. Guide the user/reader thru the verifying process and in the content you'll present constraints, temporals, and the rest of it. Write from a verif perspective where you just happen to be using [tool]. Don't fall into a [tool] command-oriented proselytizing perspective. Basically, just follow thru on your promise; it was a good one.

From Michael Horne, CEO of Qualis Design, and from Linda Zalzala, Principal Engineer at Qualis, in reference to updates to corporate web site:

Absolutely. We get good traffic on the Qualis Library, and with Kyle taking ownership (go get 'em, Kyle) on keeping it updated, we expect traffic to grow. Keep directing those engineers to the site! Michael

Linda Zalzala wrote: Instructors, Don't forget to tell your students to checkout these new updates to our web page. This is definitely something that they will use. I met someone here in Austin that knew of Qualis because of our Quick Reference Cards on our web page. Thanks to Kyle for all the effort to update the web page with useful stuff.

From Bernie DeLay, Product Development Director at Qualis, for helping prepare his presentation at a conference:

Thanks again for all you hard work on getting this ready and uncovering those gremlins before the presentation. We couldn't have done it without you! --Bernie

From David Black, Principal Engineer at Qualis, about helping him with his presentation:

Thanks a bunch for doing this on such short notice! You're great. David

From my instructor of Web Technologies course after hearing my final presentation:

You are not paid enough! Very well done.