This blog, and the bigger website it wants to grow into, is a long time coming. For years I actively avoided the idea of a blog, lacking any sense of a clear purpose for such a project, and not caring to add to the general noise of the interwebs. Almost a year ago, that attitude started to change. I didn’t do anything else differently, I just started to realize that I did have something of my own to contribute to the professional discussions I’d been following fitfully for years. I also started to dream bigger about my professional goals.

I had grandiose notions of creating a built-entirely-by-my-very-own-self website using cool cutting edge (or at least fashionable) tools, showing off what I could do behind the scenes as well as with the words on the page.

Yeah, right. I still have those notions, but I’m also still working on turning them into realistic plans — quite a different proposition.

Then I attended a conference, my first professional conference ever in my second career (or third, or fourth, depending on how you count) — mildly ironic, since my first professional career involved a very large amount of conference-hopping. And … it was GREAT. Inspiring. I had even more to say, and groups of people I hoped to be able to discuss my thoughts with.

That conference was writethedocs PDX, back in early May. It’s now mid-September. And … yeah, it’s just a blog. On WordPress. No exploring new tech yet (new to me, that is). But maybe someday it will grow into some semblance of the site I originally envisioned. Or maybe it will morph into something altogether else along the way.

In case you find this page early on in the bloglife, and also to try to keep myself honest, here are some current potential topics, in no particular order:

  • Doc quality — how to test, assess, measure ROI
  • (Closely related) How do we define good software doc writing?
  • User research — how can we know which docs really matter? What customers really need?
  • OAuth and me
  • Swagger and me
  • APIs and me (mostly docs)
  • Learning to code on my own