Re: Now is the winter of our dis-CONTENT (was Content vs. Style)

["Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Nice thread... I look forward to reading all the posts this
weekend when I have time...

I'm a self-employed consultant, TW since 1992. I do a lot of
different projects, and I like it that way.

My current project is with an insurance company.  I am analyzing
their legacy systems (still in production) to identify and
document its business rules, which they need to know before they
can build their new enterprise system. I spend most of my day
reading COBOL on VMS, with an occasional call to an SME (usually
a business SME, not a programmer). My docs are written in
FrontPage and deposited into SharePoint.  (I was pleasantly
surprised by FrontPage; it's not as bad as I thought it would
be). 

My previous project was with a company that does consulting and
development for the pharma industry. I documented the internals
of a server product that monitors data from multiple sources
(SCADA, SQL, file systems) and tracks it for CFR Part 11
purposes. It was nice to get some FDA compliance experience.

Before that I was with a dot-com where I documented XML-based
APIs, and got some fairly heavy experience with web development.
I learned a lot about the importance of clean *ml code.  

Lately I have been getting jobs that require more
analytical/technical ability and less traditional tech-pubs
skills. After a few years in the business, my word-of-mouth
network is finally starting to kick in (good thing too, because
Monster et al is now useless). A few times I have been called in
by managers who felt their current tech writers were not techie
enough for their newest project.  This is partly because I have
been selective, but partly due to serendipity. I now feel
capable of understanding just about any human-readable program
code. 

I really haven't been too concerned about publishing tools
lately. Most of my docs end up either as Word documents, or just
dumped into some internal knowledge base. I haven't fondled a
font for a while now. 

Regards,
Mike O.

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