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Category Archives: working
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My Career Evolution from Tech Writer to… Many Things
I recently gave a talk at at internal Amazon conference for tech writers. I was a technical writer from early in my career, and still consider tech writing one of my foundational skills. In the talk, I hoped to provide some insight to other technical writers about their own skills, and how those could be used in other roles. I’m sharing all that information here, in case you also find it useful. (It was an hour-long talk, which makes for a very long blog post!)
Continue reading My Career Evolution from Tech Writer to… Many Things
Toxic Things I Once Believed
Once upon a time, I believed that:
I had to adhere to a commonly-accepted standard of beauty for women, in order to be found attractive at all. (And “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”)
It was normal and natural for a woman to be considered less and less attractive as she got older – men would always prefer younger women. Yet even very young women were supposed to be attracted to older men for their maturity, experience, power, and money – the men’s physical attractiveness barely entered into the equation.
It was important for a woman not to “let herself go,” and especially not to get fat. She should make every effort to stay attractive to her mate (while he was not required to make any such efforts).
Marketing Your Open Source Project
In March of this year, I spoke at the Southern California Area Linux Expo (SCaLE), a conference I’ve been attending for years and highly recommend for its kind community, and great people and content.
Here’s the video of my talk:
I’m submitting this talk to other conferences, and it will evolve over time, so I hope to get a chance to continue refining it and sharing what I know with more people.
In sickness and in health
People tend to stay with Ericsson for many years, some for their entire careers – which can make it a little weird to be a newbie around here. There’s a lot I still don’t know about this huge, complex, historic company, and I really didn’t know what to expect when … well, let me tell this story in some kind of order.
I started with Ericsson in June, 2014, in a business unit (Cloud & IP) that was only just being formed. I was immediately thrown into the thick of things, and was loving my job: exciting challenges, great colleagues, lots of travel… In fact, I was in Paris at a tech conference in early November when I got my breast cancer diagnosis.
Being told that you have cancer is very, very scary. Wondering whether your job may be at risk because of your illness makes it all the more frightening. I knew that I had great benefits at Ericsson, including very good health insurance. I also knew that the state of California, where I live and work, has a law protecting employees and their jobs in case of catastrophic illness (your own or a family member’s) – but that law applies only after you’ve been in a job for a year, and I had been an employee for less than six months.
