Life
New employment: LaunchDarkly
Last week I told you about my exciting new job title, Developer Advocate. This week, let me tell you about my exciting new employer! On Monday I started a job with LaunchDarkly, a startup that does feature flags as a service. Feature flags are a way to distribute software with reduced risk. For example, if…
New job title: Developer Advocate
I've had a lot of job titles in my career: Technical Writing Intern Queen of Documentation (It was 2000, OK?) Technical Writer I, II, III Technical Communicator Senior Technical Writer Technical Writing Consultant Documentation Architect Documentation Mercenary You might notice a theme there. I've been a technical writer for a lot of different companies, because…
Consulting retropsective
I’ve been doing Agile for too many years to feel like I’ve learned something unless I identify it with a proper retrospective. I’m about to start an FTE job, and my consulting will obviously drop way off (but not entirely). So here we go: What went well I passionately loved the independence. I could fire…
Open Source Citizenship Award
I was at Open Source Bridge this week, with my kiddo Baz. We were both giving talks, and I was giving a workshop on interviewing with Carol Smith. Also I got to MC the slideshow karaoke part of the after-party, which was huge fun. But the big news is that I won an award for…
The art of deleting
I have a talk where I encourage everyone to be clear on the data they collect and keep. I encourage people to automate deletion so they don’t have to do anything extra. In the original incarnation of the talk, I said that everyone should apply konmari principles to the data they keep, only instead of…
Lady Speaker Small Talk
Sometimes, I think the hardest part of going to conferences is the unstructured time – lunches and happy hours and sponsored parties. That’s the time I remember I’m surrounded by 2,445 total strangers. And I’m supposed to be networking with them. If I think too much about this, I end up at “what do I…
Wordstar 2000, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and the moulding of a young mind
Musing about how software changes the way we think by offering us new concepts to integrate.
Post on Opensource.com: How to nail a tech writer job inteview
I was excited to write another post for opensource.com: How to nail a tech writer job interview It’s an extension of a twitter rant I went on a bit ago, about how important it is to know certain things about interviewing as a technical writer, but no one is teaching them, from what I can…
Hidden Figures, Shine Theory, and Being Friends with Women
I saw Hidden Figures this week, and I happy-cried at least three times during it. It is a blatantly heroic story about very feminine expressions of power. There is a trickster, a paladin, and a wizard, and although they each have their own missions and their own tribulations, they do it all in immaculate lipstick,…
Upcoming appearances
Velocity Berlin
Minneapolis DevOps Meetup
DeliveryConf