Progress on blog updates, I’ve been working on cleaner, reliable, and reuseable content as I work to develop principles for what I want my portfolio to be.
My Motivation
My job contract is ending soon, so I’ve been actively searching the job market. Many roles I desire require me to prove some form of work experience with samples. However, everything in my contract is under strict NDA so I’m unable to provide samples of my growth, thus hindering my job search and credibility. During this month’s update I’ll talk about projects in the works and new features for the blog. Building in public once again.
Fun Projects
Ready: CoverLetter Template
The project I mentioned back in March was this Cover Letter Template to reduce my application time and really stand out among candidates. It shows off my skills with LaTex and Markdown, two commonly used markup languages I’ve worked extensively with, that my prior work samples don’t show. In addition, I integrated other libraries pandoc and scripting to make the process plug and chug and running after a git clone. I developed this by searching for markdown pdf generators and finding a good base to work off of. I’ll document more about it on my github once I publish it and write a README.md that people without a coding background can understand.
Seriously though, the amount of time the template has saved me lets contribute more frequently to this blog, which further reduces my burnout.
Mentorship: American Born Coders Write
To grow in my career I’ve been working on searching for technical writing mentors, but it’s tough and most if not all have ghosted me. I think it’s coupled with the fact that technical writers don’t make much, it’s a super broad role like “engineering”, and there aren’t as many out there aware of the impact one can have on their organzation or company. These key factors are what lead many to be mistaken about technical writing, and a vast majority think it focuses on writing, when in actuality about communication and reasoning.
With that being said, I’ve been in the workforce for about 4-5 years now and I believe I’ve learned enough to train new technical writers, and pitch the role to (mostly tech) compaanies.
Fun: ActiveRPG
Outside of work, I spend my Saturdays playing in-person Role Playing Games with my close friends. We’ve all grown bored of DnD and the roll20 systems, especially and after the OpenGL fiaso. We looked for other game systems, but I couldn’t find something that seemed so I decided to take on the heavy task of building my own. I’m going for a simple
Site Release Log
CSS Sucks. Sorry
Styling is a necessary evil when creating web applications, and boy is it monotonous. It’s often the number one cause of burnout for me, and why I dread going back to frontend tasks. But… over the years I realize just how barren this site has become. I orginally wanted to make it like a 80s professors webpage, all minimalist in linux font style, but hen I realized how painful it was to navigate it. My decision to use Jekyll instead of React was also because of how easy it would be to update CSS and generate pages. Since the site’s development in 2020, I’ve decided to switch from a minimalist look to a more modern feel, as I keep this site very hidden, so it’s mostly recruiters or friends that know of it.
While a friend may not care about how the site looks, a recruiter will. These changes look to expand the functionality across multiple devices and
Drowning in technical debt
I’ve wanted tags for a while but never thought of what they could be. As I keep adding more and more posts, it’s obvious that I’ll need to revisit each of them and add tags. Better late than never, so I’ll be revising my blog contents with tags and apply my SEO skills while I’m at it. Each post will have at most 3 tags, and the type of tag will represent the target audience between code, write, and learn. In additional I’ll have mutually exclusive work-life tags such as personal and professional. Luckily Jekyll has a categories variable in the fluid so I’ll try to build off that.
Major improvements to quality of search. A blog just isn’t a blog without tags. A lesson from the Amazon Bookstore, “where are my tags” fiasco.
Machine Learning: AI-My
Crazy idea, but if it works, it’ll pay off in droves. My work industry has been in ML and research, and this change is what will have my portfolio stand out. I’ll be working on training a machine learning model to answer questions on my resume, blog, and eventually be able to navigate users with a query. To accomplish this is no easy feat, so I’ve already done my research and have a roadmap ready! For any tech enthusiasts here’s my gameplan, broken down into simple words. Start by transforming my resume into a series of structured texts, this will have answers be propagated from texts. Next, develop confidence intervals to do a simple tag search based on NLU of user queries.
Huge milestone that builds on my SEO knowledge, user experience, and machine learning skills.
Posting Plan
Earlier this year, I provided a posting plan to write 4 posts about
- 1. Why I became a technical writer?
- 2. Work-Life Harmony
- 3. Experiencing Imposter Syndrome
- 4. Scrum-Like Project Management