We had lunch outside. I could barely eat for all the excitement. Once we got on board, the skipper asked us to captain the boat. I volunteered early, hoping to just steer her out of the harbor and let a friend take over. I wiggled her around in between the shallows, getting more and more terrified.

The wind was fierce. I was cold with two coats on. The Bay seemed to be telling us to stay on dry land and retreat quietly to the machines. I thought we would sit down and learn some basics before getting on the boat. After all, I didn’t know the stern from the bow. But no matter—it turns out that you can learn to sail in the water without too much trouble.

Pick something on the horizon, focus on it, and steer into the wind. The boat will tilt onto its side, secured by a lead keel. You can’t see it, but it’s important to remember. Your friends and your stomach will revolt. Never mind all the spraying and shouting. Head windward. Hold steady. It’s okay. You’re doing great. Go go go.

I’m in California this week. I keep looking at the water on the way to work, remembering how much it scared me that day. Exhilarating fear and tired relief. I haven’t felt that kind of rush again until now.

I’ve decided to work on personal projects and come back to freelancing. Next Friday is my last day at Facebook. This wasn’t an easy decision for me. I’m leaving a stable job for wilder winds, but with everything I have planned for this year, it feels like the right thing to do.

The water seems calm now. The sun outlines its surface with a white sheen. I’m shuttling south with a few bittersweet feels. The wind is picking up along the highway.

Onward. Ignore the shouting. Keep going. You’ve got this.

You can pick up a copy of Offscreen on their site or at a shop near you.

• You’re so young! How did you get into the tech industry?
• How did you know what you wanted to do?
• Can you give me some career advice?

As these kinds of questions overlap, I wanted to try to summarize my responses here. It’s a bit messy at the moment.

Getting into semantics

First thing’s first: “tech” isn’t an exclusive club. We are all part of technology. We work on it and it works on us.

The word “technology” is kind of broad and loaded. There are a bunch of different definitions. Kevin Kelly says: “a technology is a thought expressed.”

Bernard Stiegler says:

“It is organized inorganic matter that transforms itself in time as living matter transforms itself in its interaction with the milieu.”

Woah, yeah. Slightly terrifying in scope. Let’s narrow it down. For the purpose of this post, when I say technology, I mean systems, including websites, apps, software, and hardware.

A million ways in

As for career advice, there’s no universal answer. I can tell you what I did. I can tell you that I’m still learning and looking and stumbling along. And I can tell you what I find to be true, but it’s really up to you.

I’m in the middle of Sheryl Sandberg’s book right now, and this line sticks out for me: “It’s not a ladder. It’s a jungle gym.” There are a million ways to find a job or make a career for yourself. I know that kind of sucks as an answer, because we want a path with guaranteed results. We want a checklist or a procedure. We want answers. Give us a top ten, for the love of humanity! But we’re all just figuring it out as we go.

“The secret is there is no secret – just doing the best you can with what you’ve got.” — Mary C. Curtis

What if we tried enjoying that instead of dreading it? Eep. As for me, I didn’t plan to “work in technology” and I don’t really think of it that way. I love solving problems and humanizing what otherwise becomes lifeless and awkward.

Perhaps the fastest way to work on the web is to start now. Pay attention to things around you and play with them. Make a site or sketch an app on paper. Write down what bothers you about things you use. Do you have a mobile device? What feels unfinished about it?

Have computers changed your life in a memorable way? Everything we use was designed. What feels broken? What leaves you with questions?

Find a way or make one

When I finished college, I didn’t have a plan. I knew I wanted to be a writer and decided that Apple was the place. I loved their products. I believed in the company. I wanted to be a part of Steve’s magical machine that thinks different and just works.

The problem was my resume. I started working at a young age. My first job was making sandwiches at a deli. I moved on to be a hostess, a smoothie girl, a stocker, a bookkeeper, an opener and closer, a book buyer, and an inventory manager. Everything I had done was related to people and service. I had no formal writing experience, unless you count school papers and music reviews. I applied for a couple of positions at Apple, but they wouldn’t call me back.

I decided to be persistent and get in a different way. I knew I liked helping people and wanted to start there. Who knows where that could take me? So in 2005, I quit my bookstore job of four years and started working at Apple’s call center as a contractor. I learned how the company worked and got used to the systems it runs on. I answered questions, processed returns, and made templates for myself to make my job easier. I was measured on how long I talked and how happy I made my customers. That taught me to be concise and attentive to patterns.

After a month, they asked me to answer emails. After three months, they hired me and asked me what I wanted to work on. We didn’t have good training materials or documentation, so I wanted to fix that. I started writing documentation and training other reps full time. Two years later, we had global training and templates for every kind of channel. Five years later, we had launched iPhone and iPad, along with a bunch of other things. I started as an agent and left as a communications lead. If I hadn’t been open to starting at the bottom, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do any of that.

As we say at Facebook, find a way or make one. If you’re open to jumping around or working in roles that seem tangential to what you want to do, you can learn a lot really quickly, especially if you’re at a place that grows exponentially each year.

To code or not to code

I get this one every now and then:

“I’m not a programmer, but I want to work at a technology company in sales or communications. Is there any advice you can give me?”

I’m not a programmer either. You don’t have to know how to code, but you need to understand how the web works.

I’ve taken classes and workshops, but programming is less interesting to me than solving communication problems. I wanted to be a writer; I happen to be interested in technology. Since people who write code often need help on the interface side, I get the best of both worlds. I understand markup (HTML and CSS), write in Markdown, and read a bit of PHP and Ruby. For me, that’s been enough so far.

Learn together

If you want to better understand the web, find people you respect and try to work with them. Take friends out for coffee or invite them over for a meal.

“Anyone who really wants to learn without school has to find other people to learn with and from. That’s the open secret of learning outside school. It’s a social act. Learning is something we do together.” — Kio Stark

Find conferences and videos that interest you. There are hundreds of videos from older conferences online (ex: Build, Do Lectures, SXSW, XOXO, CS Forum, An Event Apart).

Some people like paid internships. I like to work on personal projects, as they help me keep learning and give me the chance to make things with fewer constraints. You might think about making something with a friend, whether for love or money. If you like your company but want to switch jobs, find a mentor or start a mentoring circle with peers on different teams.

Pick a direction

Take some time to think about what you like doing.

• What gets you excited about the web and technology? Do you like the speed, openness, or maybe how people can talk to each other across miles?

• Do you have any hobbies or skills that get you up each day?

• Are you a data nerd or do you like archives? What kind of person do you think of yourself as? Where do you like hanging out? Do you play video games or care about movies?

• Do you want to work with other people closely in a messy, iterative way? Or do you prefer working alone and then coming back with a big contribution or set of insights?

• Do you like asking questions, summarizing, or interviewing people? Or do you prefer to sketch things out visually?

• If you could work for any company, which one would it be? Why?

• Have you ever worked in the food industry or retail? If not, client work might not be for you.

These are just a few ideas of things to think about. Like I said before, get to know your friends who work on the web and ask them about their experience too. See if they’ll show you things they make before they push the publish button or commit their code.

Find a field (or two or three)

There are a lot of fields in the tech industry and most of them overlap with each other. You can read about these things for free on Wikipedia:

• Engineering
• Front-end development
• Product design
• Product management
• Web design
• User experience design
• Communication design
• User research (ex: qualitative and quantitative research)
• Information architecture
• Content strategy
• Web writing
• Web marketing
• Web standards
• Accessibility

The list goes on… You’ll probably see overlap and I’m definitely forgetting some things. Try to narrow it down to a few things that strike you. The questions in the last section should help you a little bit. Another thing you might try is to look at companies you like, see what they’re hiring for, and read about the skills or responsibilities they mention.

If you’re not super technical and don’t want to learn to code, testing (sometimes called QA or QE) or user research might be good options for you. You may notice a bunch of terms for design (IXD, UEX, ID, UXD, yadda yadda). Don’t let that distract you.

Books to read

If you have time to read a few short books, I would recommend these no matter what you do:

• Rework by Jason Fried
• What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
• The Chairs Are Where the People Go by Sheila Heti and Mischa Glouberman
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Don’t Go Back to School by Kio Stark

The next three are all from A Book Apart, which you can purchase as a series or individually. I’d start with these if you want specific, quick primers.

• The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
• Design is a Job by Mike Monteiro
• Content Strategy for Mobile by Karen McGrane

Sites to follow

Here are a few cross-disciplinary sites that I like:

• A List Apart is a great resource for people who make websites, covering research, code, content, design, web standards, and working with clients.
• Contents Magazine explores the future of publishing and online content.
• Frank Chimero has several great essays in his archives about the design process.
• Trent Walton talks about designing for the web with a focus on mobile sites.

There are lots more blogs, so take a look around.

I hope something here pushes you in the right direction! Feel free to send me questions. I’ll keep adding to this as I have time.

With all these changes and related feelings, I’ve started focusing on “reading experiences” over “user experiences.” It’s easier for me to get concrete as a writer and editor if I focus on thinking like a reader. This means reading my own work over and over again on different screens and in different scenarios. To explore and expand on ideas I’m working through, I wrote a long piece about longform for Web Standards Sherpa.

A brief intro:

People are reading on screens. According to the OPA study, at least a third of tablet owners pay for content from magazines, books and newspapers. Much of this content can be considered “longform,” which is anything over 1,500 words. These pieces are longer than email newsletters and press clips. They’re neither bite-sized nor book-sized, but they deserve the same sort of uninterrupted attention you’d give a reader in a bookstore or library.

Today’s web designers and writers have to accommodate a variety of devices and text formats. So what can we do to embrace this shifting landscape of content and devices? The answer is deceptively simple: make readers comfortable, no matter what they’re reading or what device they use.

If you’re publishing text on the web, I hope you find the article enjoyable and useful. Long live the long ones.

Confab UK

Later this month, I’ll be doing an Ignite-style talk at Confab UK. I’m stoked to share a few tips and tricks that have worked for me in my first year at Facebook. And since the Confab peeps are running the show, you know it’ll be a fabulous time with cocktails and cake.

Dare Conference

I’ll also be flying east for Dare Conference in September. Jonathan Kahn is organizing this be-brave-with-us smarty party, along with Rhiannon Walton, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and a few more peeps I can’t wait to meet. Gah, I am dying to hear Karen speak at this one. Have you read her latest piece for ALA?!

I’ll be talking about when grit gets in the way—and sharing some ultra personal stories about opening up and slowing down.

And one more…

I’ll post details here soon.

Pumped as all get out to see you soon. To the UK!

Looking at the archive…

As an evolution of feelings

What’s the best way to update old blog posts? Does my audience care if I’ve changed the meaning of something from 2011 or simply removed the harshness of my tone? What about the fact that I often write to get it halfway there (or even 5% there), just to help myself understand my feelings?

What if my feelings turn inside out? What if I want to delete something, because it’s just plain bad?

Do I get to decide what’s important as the author? Why? Or do my readers get to decide with traffic, comments, or attention?

Is frequency important, or is all of this an exhaustive attempt at making order out of chaos? Maybe I should stop right now.

As a written record

What are the ethics of deleting something? Or hiding it? What if I just shove it in a corner or an armpit, only to be found by Google or someone with a link? Why bother keeping it there, if it’s not worth sharing openly?

Is it an archive if I don’t preserve my words as they were originally posted? Or does it break the web to think anything should be static for more than a month or two? Do we breathe here in minutes, months, or milliseconds?

As a resource

Is this helpful if it’s not updated? Should I announce every change I make, or put notes within each article? Do I get to summarize my own summaries, or is there a more programmatic way of showing changes, like a differential or commit?

Should I notify anyone of anything? Or is it annoying and uninteresting to know about teeny changes on a personal site? But isn’t everything connected? Even if my opinions are small and unsharpened, isn’t that the point of sharing them and working on them over a lifetime?

So many things are making me think about this, not least of which is the Contents Book Club. Join us in reading The Library at Night.

The Voice Memos app is a secret favorite of mine. I use it to record talks, interviews, concerts, beach sounds, mountain streams, and personal memos. It’s great for sending an audio note to someone you love in an email.

Read the full interview on The Setup.

Check it out and subscribe to the feed, or follow @thepastrybox on Twitter.

There’s a lot of talk about publishing these days. We need lightweight tools. We need repeatable processes. We need ways of making money. We need to chunk up ideas and flex them into form. We need data. Big, big data. But all this comes after we’ve taken time to think and talk through things so they’re worth reading.

This week, I’m working on a piece that’s bending my brain. The structure is solid. The bones are intact; I did my research. I can see where it’s going, but it’s not there yet. It’s a draft in a slew of drafts, somewhere between an idea, an outline, and something shareable, but not lively enough to stand on its own or have my name beside it.

I’m jumping between Pages, iA Writer, Basecamp, and Gists. As if wrangling the ideas isn’t enough, I’ve given into the task of shifting bits from text to Markdown and then to Basecamp’s styling. It’s enough to break my flow and it has.

Now I’m dreaming of writing in space with an app that doesn’t exist yet. It’s a combination of things that are out there, or maybe just a bridge between them. It would let me write, edit, share, and publish in one place—and have all my versions backed up for reference. It would let me follow the flow without moving text at all:

• Write, read, and edit in Markdown from any device, without needing to squint.
• Autosave and sync everything to Dropbox.
• Store separate files for each major version of a document.
• Share drafts for review by permalink or private message.
• Publish to WordPress, Tumblr, Facebook, or Squarespace by giving the app permission to do so.
• Display links to individual versions of the post publicly on my site or Facebook account.

This would give me a way to make new things, discuss them with friends, and make them better—while choosing the audience along the way. That’s my dream today. What’s yours?

Client work

I started the year off with Lab Zero and a few personal clients. I wanted to go into 2012 with fewer projects so I could feel more confident and at peace in my work—and I kept that promise to myself pretty well. I pulled back on huge, hairy chaos and focused on Lab Zero’s website redesign. I left before it was finished, but it looks great, friends, and I miss you like woah.

Along with helping my peeps at Pier 9, I took a few projects in the spring:

Survs hired me to write a couple of brief product announcements. I loved working with these guys across the pond and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Katie Chin needed a few more case studies for her winter-inspired portfolio. If you’re looking for a designer in New York, hire this lady. She’s smart as a whip and super easy to work with, even from SF!

Quality Peoples asked me to do some copywriting for their latest collection. We also collaborated on a few tees with my haiku.

I helped 45Royale a bit with their spiffy new site by spot-checking nomenclature and giving them editorial advice.

Special thanks to my repeat clients this year. It’s so lovely to hear from people more than once and I loved working with you all.

A change in direction

A few months into the year, I started feeling comfortable. Too comfortable for my own taste. I’d been consulting for about two years and wanted to switch things up, so I started looking for a big change. From 2005 to 2011, I usually felt like the lone ranger. If I wasn’t the only content person, I was usually the one training the others—and I was super hungry to learn from other content peeps.

So in late March, I interviewed at Facebook and landed the job. Holy moly, that was quick! I gave my notice, said my goodbyes, shut up shop, and headed down to Menlo Park to join a growing team of content strategists. And I’m so happy I did.

It’s an incredible honor to work with Facebook Design and I’m super stoked about the projects I’m on. If you’re curious about Facebook Content Strategy, here are a few links to learn more about us:

• What’s in a Name? The Art and Science of Naming at Facebook by Melody Quintana
• Meet Diane Murphy, Content Strategist at Facebook from CS Forum 2012
• An Interview with Tiffani Jones Brown by Erin Kissane
• What is the Role of a Content Strategist at Facebook by Evany Thomas
• Life As The Voice Of Facebook from HuffPo
• Pages Redesign: Q&A with Content Strategist Amy Thibodeau by Holly Burns
• Content Strategist Job Description on Facebook Careers

In my first few months at Facebook, I focused on voice and tone for the Facebook Developers site. Since the fall, I’ve been working on Facebook Timeline and what we call the Open Graph. It’s a bit of an abstract concept, but I like to think of it as how you express yourself through things you care about. (Stay tuned for more about my role these days.)

In the community

Along with growing with my team, I tried to stay involved with the larger content strategy community this year. I went to Confab in Minneapolis and hung around Brooklyn Beta in the fall. I fell head over heels at Books in Browsers and spent a good amount of time mentoring peeps in San Francisco or by email. For more about Books in Browsers, check out the talks on YouTube. My notes are on Facebook, too.

Writing

I doubled-down on writing for the industry this year. Here’s a recap of my new work for a few publications:

• Space to Breathe in Contents Magazine
• Beyond the Page in the Readmill Blog
• Art of the Quiet Interface in Web Standards Sherpa

I also shared a few tricks in my tiny content strategy framework. Check them out on GitHub.

Interviews and more

Jonathan Kahn interviewed me for his delightful podcast. Laura Uhlir also interviewed me at home with Geoffrey for her site, Rad Lady.

I redid the Swell Content site to be more readable on mobile devices and relaunched my personal blog.

I also launched Born Hungry, an online magazine for home cooks. I have a few pieces of my own there along with smarties like Jonathan Kahn and Kate Kiefer Lee.

Thank you

This has been a wild, beautiful year for me. I want to thank my friends, colleagues, mentors, clients, critics, and sweet boyfriend. Thank you for supporting me in all my efforts to slow down and dive into writing more deeply. Thanks again for encouraging me to be me.

I have a few exciting things to share in the next few weeks. To the new year!