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About Me

Image title Hi, I'm Katy. I'm a Gen Xer who graduated college during an economic downturn. While it was nothing like the crash of 2008 many years later, it was a disheartening time — I remember competing for barista jobs with candidates who had master's degrees and PhDs and long resumes. I wound up working retail a bit, job hopping a bit, and then, toward the mid-1990s, I stumbled on HTML.

You wouldn't think that such a simple thing would be so life changing, but it was. Thirty years later, this extant markup language is still at the center of my career.

What do I do for a living? I'm a technical content manager for a Salesforce app partner. If you're only familiar with Salesforce in passing, it was founded in 1999 as a sales and marketing tool and has grown into a multifaceted platform that supports many different industries. My company builds higher ed technology applications on the platform, and I manage our customer-facing help documentation.

I transitioned our product guides from Google Docs to a structured authoring format and designed and built a help website to publish them. I started by using OxygenXML and more recently changed to MkDocs, a static site generator. So, web development and content markup are very much a day-to-day part of my job.

About Katy's Notebook

The scope of this website is technical communications, or "tech comm" for short. Tech comm is a fairly broad term that encompasses many industries and job roles — from the instruction booklets that come with your IKEA furniture to mechanical engineering manuals to software user documentation. This site will focus mainly on the last, but it gets even more niche than that.

I'd like to:

  • Introduce Salesforce professionals to tech comm
  • Introduce tech comm professionals to Salesforce
  • Create projects of interest to both audiences

Publishing Schedule

Initially my publishing schedule might be a little spotty as I get this site up and running. I plan to develop a steadier routine as I go along.

A Few Personal 'Fun Facts'

  • I drive a stick (it's the only way to drive!)
  • I have a Gen Z daughter and two Gen Alpha grandsons
  • I've built three gaming PCs — one for myself, one for my daughter, and one a complete rebuild to update the motherboard, hard drives, memory, and graphic and video cards
  • I live in Oak Park, Illinois, the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway and a showcase for Frank Lloyd Wright architecture
  • I cook and bake from scratch, mostly vegetarian and vegan recipes

Social Media

As the times — and the platforms — are a-changing, I've been rethinking my social media presence. Right now I'm not very active on any social media site.

Disclaimer

This website is a personal project "for the love of the game" and does not represent the views of my employer.