Tag: writing

  • The Book of Apshai—a personal exegesis (May 31, 2023)

    A tour through the chapters of a most unusual and personally formative computer game manual from 1985.

  • Stuff I did (and stopped doing) in 2021 (January 3, 2022)

    My 2021 was less about accomplishment than revision. Most of it was good, and none of it was easy.

  • I got a job (redux) (June 28, 2021)

    Today I join Google as a technical writer. This completes a process that began more than six months ago. Intense mid-winter interviews preceded many conversations with leaders of various writing teams within the gigantic company, all shepherded by heroically patient recruiters. (Thank you, Tyler!)

  • I got a job (January 16, 2021)

    Under cover of my birthday, I indulge in some personal news. Later this month I will join Hydrolix, a tiny startup with a very specific database product, as a full-time technical writer. This fulfills the career pivot I began to ponder 18 months ago, and represents both my first new job as a New Yorker and my first salaried job in over 15 years.

  • A new style guide for Perl documentation (January 3, 2021)

    One for the brag sheet :

  • Filling in the blanks (October 20, 2020)

    Writing, puzzle-solving, and the benefits of daily diversion.

  • A new guide about Bise (September 5, 2020)

    I’m pleased to announce a new guide to installing and using Bise, my simple log-analysis tool for measuring a website’s recurring readership. My thanks to Linode for lending me a platform to share this guide with a wider audience than my writing usually has — and I suppose I can enjoy some fun irony about that, given the subject matter.

  • Regression therapy through computer-language documentation (April 19, 2020)

    I completed a small grant-project to revise some Perl documentation, and it had me confront my surly self from 20 years ago.

  • I’m looking for tech-writing work (July 14, 2019)

    Twenty years after accepting my first job as a software engineer, I’d like to try picking up some technical-writing work. If I find that it agrees with me, I might well consider refocusing my career into writing full-time, making software development an activity I’d continue to pursue for my own benefit only.

  • On unconsciously ripping off Lars von Trier (June 23, 2019)

    Imagine my surprise when I saw a scene from a game I wrote in 2010 appear in a movie I'd never watched before from 2009.