# Career

It took me a while to find my career path as a tech writer. But with a formal education in writing, a love for code, and history of technical support, it's a perfect match.

I've been a nomad much of my life, so my journey is defined by the places I've lived.

City scape image

# Boston

I started my career in Boston working for Apple retail. I held a variety of positions which included sales, tech support, education, visual merchandising, and scheduling. These roles involved customer support and people management.

A lack of meaningful career growth and a stagnant job market made me rethink my location. Having lived in New England most of my life, I decided to head west and completely start over.

# Denver

After a brief stint as a legal assistant, I decided to enroll in the frontend program at the Turing School of Software & Design. I knew a few people who had gone through the backend program and I wanted to see if my childhood hobby of coding (i.e., customizing HTML on LiveJournal) could land me a new career.

I chose the frontend program because I enjoy design and wanted to find a career that included creativity in coding. The program was a full-time, nine month commitment. I learned HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript, React, Node, and test driven development.

When I moved to Denver, I had every intention of staying in Colorado forever (Golden is the perfect town). But after a few months of job searching, I was in final interview stages at companies in Denver and Amsterdam.

# Amsterdam

From job offer to plane ticket was about three weeks. It was a bittersweet whirlwind leaving Colorado, but I knew I'd never get an opportunity like this again.

I worked for a file transfer company, WeTransfer, that also had a large creative platform. My department was a "creative studio" and was unique within the company. We focused on creating interactive and animated advertisements for the transfer service, as well as artistic experiences for the creative platform.

I designed and developed global campaigns for brands like Adidas, Adobe, Hulu, and Scotch & Soda. My team also amplified the voices of local artists through an initiative to give advertising space to the community.

On the brand and marketing side, I worked on larger creative experiences. My team partnered with people and organizations like Björk, FKA twigs, Yayoi Kusama, and the Tate Modern.

After three years of being a creative developer, I was looking for a new challenge. Unfortunately, my desire for change coincided with the pandemic. I decided to end my journey in Amsterdam rather than navigate a foreign job market during an uncertain economy.

# Providence

After another hectic move, I decided to once again rethink my career. I noticed companies hiring full-time tech writers rather than relying on engineers to maintain blogs and docs. This seemed like the perfect fit for my experience and background.

I decided to jump into technical writing through content management at an agency. Eventually, I realized engineering blogs were not where I wanted to focus my energy. But I learned a lot about SEO and content strategy and knew those skills could translate to documentation.

I shifted my work to developer documentation and this is where I found my stride. I turn technical concepts into reference guides and tutorials. And I still get to do frontend work maintaining and enhancing docs platforms. As a developer, I appreciated good documentation. Now I get to create that documentation for other developers.