Power Platform IndiePubs: Blogging

March 02, 2021

I’ve always enjoyed writing, so years ago when I thought about starting a blog, I realized I didn’t have enough interesting content to share. I worked in many different industries, sometimes in the same calendar year, and never spent enough time working on a side project I thought was worth writing about. Stepping through the positions I’ve held, I tend to notice a pattern of working in some customer-facing position such as technical support for retail Macs and then moving to a tech work position. After tech work, I’d end up in retail management positions. Trying to move back into tech work, I’d apply to all sorts of positions and either be underqualified or overqualified in general, at least until the next position came along.

In the last two positions I’ve held (both remote positions), writing documentation was 80-90% of my work time. One of my favorite things to do is write. I love the technical challenges and the wordsmithing. I might produce a thousand words one day, but the next day, I’ll go back and remove 95% of them as I think of a better way to explain a problem. I have all the patience when rewriting, but other times I write that documentation and barely give it a look over. I don’t like asking others to check my work though I do appreciate it when someone does as they inevitably catch something I didn’t.

I came to writing documentation as a knowledge base article writer for ActiveBatch in early 2018. I understood REST APIs and had written web content before, but never using an enterprise markdown editor for a large knowledge base. I was given a list of articles to migrate from the Classic knowledge base to a new KB built using MadCap Flare. The technical work was to learn the differences between different versions of ActiveBatch and then look through the old articles to pull out the sections specific to each version. I also had the goal to remove all ambiguous parts of the articles and only include the instructions to accomplish the task. It takes time to rewrite existing content as you need to first understand the original content, then determine what version(s) it applies to, then modify the article to only give clear instructions for a specific version. Along with all of that work, any new technical support specialists would need training articles and so I developed an extensive template for documenting specific new articles in the knowledge base including screenshots that would be updated for every version. I also found we needed longer-form documents for how to setup multi-tenancy, high-availability deployments, and other complex situations that technical support specialists may not have the experience to explain to large customers.

I worked in that position for just over two years until the lockdown began and I needed to leave. Sitting at home without a job (other than Stay at Home Dad), I worked on a few projects. I’ve had a LinkedIn account for many years (since 2009, actually), but I never actively worked on connecting with people. I did, however, read the content that would appear from LinkedIn on the homepage. In a couple of weeks after quarantining, I had upgraded my account to Premium for the learning opportunities, and while taking Power Platform courses, I found that the Power Platform community was very active on Twitter. I had an account, but never used the service, and so I started seeing how many people in the community I could find. At one point, I found a “Tweet your CV” tweet and so I did. And I think because of that, I started getting recruiters reaching out to me. At first, I wasn’t sure how this was going to help, but I soon landed a contract engagement that was worth 25 hours a week. I’ll write about that experience and how my engagement with the Power Platform community helped me land a position that will go towards financial independence, but that’s for another post.