About

You wouldn’t tell it from my accent, but I was born and raised in Wales. I went to London to study journalism and spent about seven years working in print and radio, mostly as a staff news reporter. My earliest online credit is a 1996 research byline from the Independent on Sunday.

After that, I spent about five years traveling around the world. To fund myself, I did a lot of office temping jobs, but I also did several stints working on sailing ships including a few weeks as relief ship’s cook.

Even before the global financial crisis, tall ships were struggling. So I retrained as a technical writer. With a brief interlude as a developer advocate and then a solutions engineer, I’ve now been doing technical writing for more than fifteen years. I’ve worked in the consumer electronics, data analysis, education, retail, science and security sectors. During that time I completed a master’s degree in informatics (computer science for liberal arts grads). I write software documentation for audiences including users, system administrators and developers.

While not reflecting my current standard of writing, my undergraduate dissertation Animal Rights in the British Broadsheet does contain original research. My paper on Square-Rig Sailing was submitted in completion of the requirements of a City & Guilds in Technical Communications Techniques. My graduate dissertation Why Don’t Women Play Video Games? was researched and written in a hurry, but contains some unexpected findings. During my break from technical writing, I started a weekly blog with a focus on technology called “Byte High, No Limit”.