Work Bio

I started in the tech field at a long-gone telecom company where I became the webmaster for the company’s first intranet site. Back then, “webmaster” meant designer, developer and sysadmin. Since then I’ve worked for a variety of companies, first around Tampa Bay, Florida, and then around Silicon Valley. Most of that work was web development, and most of that was contract work. I moved into technical writing full-time when I joined RethinkDB, an open-source database company.

Unfortunately, RethinkDB folded in 2016, as they never found a good way to monetize the product (a common refrain among startups of the day). The database itself lives on, now under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. In 2017, I joined Realm, a popular mobile database platform, as their first technical writer—a position which lasted all of nine months, as it turned out they didn’t have a good monetization strategy, either, and laid off about 90% of the company before selling themselves to MongoDB.

Now, I’m working at Bixby Labs, a group within Samsung Research America working on their voice assistant technology. Bixby Labs used to be Viv Labs, started by many of the folks originally working on Siri at Apple. I’ve been with Bixby Labs for five years as of March 2023; while job-hopping is often the Silicon Valley way, there’s something to be said for stability. In 2022, I relocated to north Tampa Bay, Florida, for family reasons, so I’m now a full-time remote worker.

In addition to documentation work, I’ve published non-fiction, including a review with About This Particular Macintosh and an article in Marco Arment & Glenn Fleishman’s The Magazine. The earlier incarnation of my tech blog, Coyote Tracks, got a lot of attention for a while; in fact, it led to my job with RethinkDB and my career switch to technical writing. So even though I can’t say I made a living as a blogger, being a blogger helped me make a living!

As a web developer, I usually worked with PHP on the server side and jQuery on the front end. While I enjoy keeping up with web technologies, I’m happy to not be doing it professionally anymore. My terrible secret is that I don’t particularly like JavaScript. (Yes, it’s gotten better. Still not my favorite.) Lately, I’ve been getting into Elixir and Phoenix, which may lead to a few secret projects down the road. Or not. We’ll see.

You can contact me for my résumé if you’re really curious, although it’s not an exhaustive history, and may not be fully up to date. If you would like the exhaustive history, you will need to buy me a coffee.