WRITING
I love the written word. I think writing and language is the nearest thing to magic in this world.
Even in the age of Artificial Intelligence, good writing separates itself. Good writing simplifies complex information. Good writing is comprehensible across skill levels. Good writing provides precise answers to inexact questions. Good writing is [insert your opinion here], because good writing is collaborative. Good writing is simultaneously sexy, neutral, exciting, and modest. Every idea passes through language, and the care with which that language is constructed determines the life of the ideas contained within.
I've worked for multiple companies. Including freelance work, I've written documentation for dozens of pieces of software. I've written style guides, blog posts, learning center articles, marketing copy, internal wiki pages, UI/UX copy, and just about everything between.
Writing is my trade, and I take it seriously.
I produce good writing.
OVERVIEW
I've been fortunate to work across a considerable variety of industries and have written in a number of voices for different jobs. I've been a communications writer in the Office of the Dean at the University of Texas McCombs School of business. I've written documentation for Financial software, Telecom and asset management software at Accruent, a variety of content and materials for AlienVault (later AT&T Cybersecurity), and network data observability documentation for Grafana most recently.
What follows are some examples of the different types of writing projects I've worked on in my career.
Technical Writing
I recently accrued my tenth year of experience as a technical writer. In that decade of time, I've seen the industry adjust to the startup boom. I've seen paradigm shifts in online deployment, content authoring processes, and ultimately AI. I've worked for companies that experienced wild growth and success, and I've worked with companies that folded. It's been an adventure and I'm glad to have
One of my favorite projects came about shortly after AT&T purchased AlienVault. There was a big marketing push to integrate third party plugins into our software as “AlienApps” to branch out into the market and really make the product a hub where users can easily manage the increasing number of unique cybersecurity projects. In my final few months with the company, I wrote the documentation for all those apps here.
What made this project so memorable to me was the way my involvement became so integral to the success. After COVID disrupted our team structure, I became the main point of contact for the project domestically. This was also the first time I was ever directly responsible for the UI design to such a large capacity
Marketing and Branding
I’ve often been asked to help with marketing content. Because I’ve been in charge of style guides and have helped compose guidelines on branding and legal formatting, I'm always willing to contribute my skills. Plus it's just fun to approach content writing from different angles at a company—there's something exciting about approaching a familiar topic from a fresh perspective.
Most recently, I helped rebrand my previous company’s products to fit the “code, ship, run” paradigm. The idea was that the company’s three main products suited the full “inner dev loop” for any company. This was going to be expanded to “code, ship, run, test” before the company’s CEO rotation decided to change directions. I wrote the landing pages for each concept and tied them to our products, while our lead designer created the graphics you see below.
Content Writing
Every creative outlet is a chance to reach people in different ways. Whenever I can, I try to contribute to blog posts and informational content at companies. Because I come from a more technical background, it gives me a chance to use my research and functional knowledge in different ways, It also gives me a chance to get exposure to more content management and authoring tools, which is more fascinating to me than it ought to be. My most recent content writing piece was a “Kubernetes Learning Center” article that was meant to be a part-marketing/part-tech demo peek at the company’s Cloud product. You can read that here.
API Documentation
I’ve worked with a lot of APIs, both in previous jobs and in my own personal projects. Here's an example of some API documentation that a teammate and I cooked up and designed over a short week. You can see the current iteration here.
