Author: Will Kelly

Will Kelly is a technical writer living and working in the Washington, DC area. After years of contracting, he returned to full-time corporate job in 2016. He writes thought leadership content around cloud, enterprise mobility, and cybersecurity topics. Will's has written for Samsung Business Insights, Tom's IT Pro, TechBeacon, CNET TechRepublic, and other sites. Earlier in his career, he wrote technical documentation for end users, developers, and operations teams. His current areas of interest include multi-cloud solutions, mobile security, and managed services. Follow Will on Twitter: @willkelly.

3 ways I use FoldingText

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One of my favorite Mac applications is FoldingText from HogsBay Software. It’s a text editor with outline formatting you can fold and unfold to see text. While I use Microsoft Word on the Mac or PC for my hardcore writing, my composing process often relies on other tools for outlining and planning my articles and posts. Historically, I’ve only used text editors when I am coding HTML or hacking at JavaScript until I found FoldingText.

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My summer 2017 reading list

federico-giampieri-87977I’m looking forward to this summer because I have some planned downtime and look forward to catching up on my reading while I’m poolside.

Here are the books I’m planning on reading this summer:

  • The Amazon Way on IoT by John Rossman so I can learn more about Amazon’s approach to the Internet of Things (IoT).
  • Stop Boring Me! by Kathy Klotz-Guest because I’d love to be able to write funny someday.
  • Lovability by Brian De Haaf because I’ve been reading De Haaf’s LinkedIn posts for a while and interested in seeing how he expands his thoughts about company building in a longer form work.
  • The Darkening Web by Alexander Klimburg because my current job does touch on some cybersecurity soIlike to stay informed.
  • Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace has been sitting on my iPad for a while and I’m looking forward to having the time to read it this summer.

What books are you reading this summer?’

Image by Federico Giampieri via Unsplash.com

A remote worker’s guide to technical document reviews

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Even in the day of mobile devices and Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs), organizations can’t escape the need to review business and technical documents for accuracy, completeness, and message. I’ve been a student of technical document reviews, for much of my career. In fact, I was a computer book technical reviewer during the great computer book over-publishing of the nineties.

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5 things about task lists

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Over the years, I’ve thought to task lists (in particular my own) because I was managing lots of small projects like articles and blog posts. Task lists kept me on track to meet multiple deadlines every week. On top of that, I’ve written about productivity apps like task list apps forTechRepublic and the now defunct WebWorkerDaily.

Like many people out there, I try to refine my workflow and tools so I can be as productive as possible and create replicable processes that help mitigate errors and improve the quality of my work.

  1. The road to productivity is paved with discarded iOS task management apps.
  2. Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder.
  3. Productivity is in the eye of the beholder.
  4. Task lists once personal are now becoming social with platforms like Asana.
  5. Some people are better organized electronically than in hard copy, the reverse is also true.

How do task lists impact your productivity?

Image by Alejandro Escamilla via Unsplash.com

Random and recent thoughts about revisions

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Unlike some writers, I’m OK with being asked for revisions whether it be an article, blog post, or technical documentation I’m writing. Writing and publishing is a team effort.
I’ve had the blessing of working with some amazing editors in the course of my writing career. Unfortunately, I’ve also worked with some organizations that could never factor in the importance of reviews into their document cycle.

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Why am I restarting a blog in 2017?

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I kept a personal blog for a number of years. It fell by the wayside for a couple of reasons. It became a casualty to too much work.  Issues with my hosting provider at the time made me take it offline altogether.

After making a career pivot last fall back to full-time employment, I decided I wanted to revisit some of my old writing. Restarting a personal blog then made more sense to me.

Image by Patrick Tomasso via Unsplash

The case for paid projects, not free writing tests

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I first want to state that I’m not averse to writing tests for full-time or contract positions. Yet, in today’s economy, my time at the keyboard is tied to billable work. A request to take a writing test came to me once from a company. Looking at the information they sent me, they could submit my output from this test to their client as a deliverable. All the while, I could be out time and money for the effort, and the company has gotten the work done for free.

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