Adventures in (Technical) Writing

In the beginning...

As a kid, I wrote pretty much obsessively. This is evident in the dozens of journals and notebooks I have in a box in our attic. I wrote short stories and longer ones, poetry, and personal essays. I wrote long, rambling diatribes in my journals about the minutiae of my days and my petty disagreements with my friends.

In high school, I joined our school newspaper and wrote poetry, episodic fiction, and opinion pieces. In my spare time, I wrote and illustrated silly little comics for my friends. Writing was such a part of who I was that I didn't even list it as an interest if asked. It seemed intrinsic to my DNA, as much a part of me as my eye color.

PRINT "In the beginning..."

Running parallel to my interest in writing was an interest in computers. I was born in the early eighties, so not everyone had computers when I was growing up. My father worked at IBM, however, and was always interested in computing. I credit him with my early fascination with tech. When I was around 10 years old, I started writing programs using QBasic on our family PC. Predictably, my programs took on a literary bent. They were often "choose your own adventure" type stories that used conditional logic to create different plots.

When my best friend Amanda's mother bought a Mac, we began playing around with Hypercard. Again, my inclination was to use it to create stories. Amanda and I would use it to make story-driven games in which the user would walk through a house, clicking on items that would reveal pieces of information as they went. The tech is so outdated now, but I still remember those games fondly.

Around 1994, I discovered the internet and, subsequently, realized that I could make web pages. This was yet another hobby that got woven into my life as a creative outlet. I made webpage after webpage about all sorts of silly things: The band Gwar, Mentos (the fresh-maker,) my friend Scott (and why I was mad at him at the time.) CSS literally didn't exist yet so the webpages were hideous, but the fact that I could link them together and make them available to the world was fascinating to me.

College, and onward

Let's fast-forward a bit, shall we? I went to college. I majored in East Asian Studies because I loved the way that Japanese sounded and enjoyed the company of the other students in the Asian Studies department. I minored in computer science, learned C++, beat my head against the wall trying to understand recursion and Big O notation, and found out that I freaking loved SQL. I met my now ex-husband while working a summer job at IBM, where I cleaned heat sinks and tested boards. We had a baby, graduated, had another one, and another. He worked at IBM while I stayed home with the kids. Then we got divorced.

I basically had to start from the ground up since I had been a stay-at-home mom. I got a job as a waitress, found an apartment, and eventually went back to school. I never considered writing for a job because I was afraid that doing it for money would "taint" my love for it. I never considered doing anything with computers, either, because I felt like I hadn't learned enough for that. Now I realize that was imposter syndrome. I was one of the top students in college and had gotten As and Bs in every class. I was also often the only woman in my classes, which had the sad effect of making me feel like the outsider in a boys club. This certainly led to my feeling that a career in tech was not for me.

I attended grad school and got my MS in Library and Information Science. I had always loved reading, learning, and information in general, so this seemed like the perfect fit.

LibraryLand

After grad school, I held a series of jobs in libraries, first as a clerk in a public library, then as a research assistant at a presidential library, then as an event coordinator, and finally as the director of a small rural library. Writing was always a huge part of my job. I wrote copy for websites, booklets, and instruction manuals. I wrote advertising copy, social media posts, and promotional emails. Oh, and I wrote grants. Lots and lots of grants. And I got almost all of them.

I always tried to incorporate tech into my library career because that interest never really went away. I did coding workshops for kids and teenagers. We did projects with Arduinos and made programs with Scratch. I brought Ozobots and Makey-Makeys to the elementary school to show the kids, then let them check them out from the library to play with at home. It was a ton of fun, and I always wanted to do more. That's when I realized that maybe I did want to go into tech.

Bootcamp!

After doing freeCodeCamp's frontend curriculum and teaching myself React, I decided to just bite the bullet and make the career change. I loved the library, but library jobs never paid enough and never offered health insurance. Plus, my favorite part of my day was always spent on the computer or teaching computer science classes, so it only made sense to try to make that my full-time job.

I applied to Codesmith and got in on my first try, with the caveat that I work more on my understanding of recursion (the dreaded recursion again!) This was their beta part-time remote intensive program (PTRI), which started right at the same time as the Coronavirus pandemic.

Because I apparently like to do things on hard mode, my partner of 10 years and I decided to have a baby around that time. I found out I was pregnant right as the 9-month PTRI program started. Yes, 9 months. I planned that perfectly, didn't I?

The program was intense. People describe it as a firehose, and they're so right. I learned a ton, and it served as a really great way to spend the pandemic.

Baby

I had my son just as I completed the Bootcamp. Like, our graduation was literally held while I was in labor. I quit my job at the library because I couldn't see myself going back to work with the public with a newborn and with Covid cases still through the roof. So I stayed home again and focused on my son.

Eventually, I knew I would need to work again. I was applying for software engineer positions but wasn't sure how I was going to finagle working a full-time job when we didn't yet feel comfortable sending our son to daycare. It was suggested to me that I start writing some technical content to help solidify what I had learned in bootcamp and to network with other technical professionals.

Technical Writing

This is how I started writing for freeCodeCamp. This led to a gig writing for Draft.dev. I started to make money doing technical writing. I had actually made money writing before, but this was a new and interesting melding of two of my most enduring interests.

A career as a writer started to make sense. Freelance writing gigs seem to be easier to find than freelance software development gigs, and I need that flexibility as my son is still home with me during the day. I have also managed to table my fear that writing for money would destroy my love for it. If anything, it has given me more opportunities to hone my craft. It's not a novel, but technical writing employs many of the same skills that you need to write a novel.

World's Okayest Software Developer

I still code every day, but I don't know if I want to be a software developer anymore. It's still on the table, but technical writing honestly seems like the perfect career for me in some ways. It uses the soft skills I developed while studying the humanities, the research skills I honed while getting my MSLIS, and the technical skills I have practiced over the years. I may not be the world's best developer or the world's best writer, but if I combine the two, I think I've got a pretty good skill set that I can improve upon.