WRITING
Writing is something everyone does, but not everyone does it well.
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. Good writing is a fantasy, a paradox, and the structural foundation of everything that has been conceived and executed upon.
I've worked for multiple companies. Including freelance work, I've written documentation for 19 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
Because the nature of my writing experiences are fairly diverse, I’ve chosen the following four major projects to illustrate the types of work I’ve done.
Technical Writing
Shortly after AT&T purchased AlienVault, there was a big marketing push to integrate third party plugins into our software as “AlienApps.” I wrote the documentation for all those apps here.
Because this was the beginning o COVID and the company made dramatic cuts to the staff, I also became the main point of contact for the overseas contract teams who were working on these apps, and I also became very involved with UI/UX, presentation, and branding. Because these were third party apps, we had to be diligent in representing their branding and copyright content correctly in the documentation and the product as well.
Marketing and Branding
I’ve often been asked to help with marketing content. Because I’ve written company style guides on branding and legal formatting, it’s a safe bet that I can help make sure the final product is market-ready.
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. I’ve documented APIs in Swagger, in Confluence, in MS Word, and in a custom Node.js tool I helped make with a teammate. You can see the current iteration here.
PROJECTS
One of the best ways to bolster value of written content is find ways to integrate other existing content into it. My time at Alienvault gave me some great chances to improve the company’s content laterally.
As is often the case with startups, we offered a premium version of the open-source product, and the open-source product had no proper documentation. However, because Google analytics showed that we got a lot of hits related to the open-source software, I figured it would be worthwhile to take advantage of that. I combed through the documentation and divided the documentation topics up so that all the features available in the open-source and premium products had their own sections, then I created some navigation icons to show what that part of the documentation applied to. This way, the premium users can see what unique features the full version offers, and open-source users can see what additional features would be available if they upgraded.
A lot of opportunities are just waiting to be found. The siloed world of tech often leaves people unaware of how much they could all help one another out.
Once I was in conversation with the training team about some new features that customers found confusing. The head of training said he made some videos for students in the training classes, and he offered to cut segments of the video up so that we could embed the videos in relevant documentation pages. This way, the training team got a little free advertising in the docs, and the docs got some professionally recorded videos to share with customers.
