explaining my career
It’s hard to build a portfolio and put it on the internet.
When freelancing, this is a mandatory step (actually, I’m not sure, is it?).
It would be easy to list out this portfolio as a CV, listing achievements year after year, patting myself on the back for each company I’ve worked for. Please see LinkedIn or UpWork if that’s really what floats your boat.
Sharing my career as a CV feels uninteresting. What I’m discussing with clients on calls is somewhat fun (at least for me).
The story I tell prospects is the one I would tell friends, explaining how those past fifteen years have been and what I’ve been through then.
Accrued shareholders of past companies don’t matter when you’re explaining your career and discussing what’s next.
My path, trajectory, and aspiration are essential and sufficient to get whether you want to work with me.
There is only one message that needs to be shared: I am a software engineer that can write.
the boring details
You might want to know more, so here is a glimpse of my journey through tech. If that’s really not your thing, then please skip ahead.
For the software engineering part, I worked as a backend engineer working with large teams serving millions of users. Evolving in this environment eventually made me lead projects and teams, working on increasingly complex efforts for the next 10+ years.
I got excited about backend, infrastructure, network, cloud, and security. Surprisingly, I got more excited about working with people and learning along the way.
Through the latter half of my corporate stint, I was in a managerial role, ironing out communication skills way more than technical skills. Communication as an engineering manager is a quarter conversational, three-quarters written. This is where technical writing solidified as a tool I was using and perfecting.
Just like re-organizing and cleaning up my room, re-organizing and cleaning up documentation was something I thoroughly enjoyed doing (weirdo). To be honest, at that time this felt like the work an engineer should do. I didn’t see how this could be a job on its own. It took a few years for me to come to that realization. To get there, I first had to burn myself out on the corporate grind. I decided to take a break from the day-to-day of a scaling and financially contrived environment.
Breathing the fresh air of a post-burnout sabbatical, sensations came back quickly that I had to figure out a way to move forward. Working independently was a logical way to make this happen. I could control the flow of work and make the discipline evolve as I see fit. It was only after a few steps that I landed my first gig as a technical writer. We were in a pre-LLM world and I got lucky to get a foot in the door of a few clients for tangentially technical (with much marketing) writings.
Soon after, I was feeling ready to get more work done and landed the gig that would make things go on rails, being responsible for documentation for a startup.
This is where it clicked. The job made sense, both its existence and why I was excited to do it.
so what do I do now
I love working with small tech companies.
Their speed is their best attribute. They have small teams of hyper-focused engineers, lean processes, and an appetite for shipping.
Customers, though, don’t care whether a company is small or big. They need to understand the product, they need documentation.
This is where I come in. I understand tech companies inside and out. I know firsthand that engineers don’t have time nor desire to build user docs.
Product move fast and needs someone dedicated to understand its changes and make them digestible to users. That’s my favourite place to be.
I’m low maintenance. I understand quickly what your product is about and what your users want to read. Just keep me in the loop with what you’re shipping, and I’ll take care of the rest.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the past 3 years, and it’s been fun.