Brief Bio

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 post-grad degrees 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. Salesforce 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 help documentation.

Personal Fun Facts

  • I drive a stick (it’s the only way to drive!).
  • I’m a single mom with a Gen Z daughter and two young 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.
  • When I’m not sitting at my computer, you might find me in the kitchen tackling the latest NYT recipe, or shopping with my daughter, or at the park with my grandsons.

About My Site

Writing is only one small part of my job. I spend much of my time structuring and formatting content in DITA/XML, creating images and editing videos, and making incremental improvements to our help website.

Structuring and formatting is more than just adding markup tags and style rules. It involves some strategy and planning — meaningful metadata, audience filtering, and variables (known as “keyrefs” in DITA) for content reuse. All of these things work together to streamline backend processes and create a better frontend experience.

With that in mind, here are a few of the topics I plan to cover:

  • Structuring content; the DITA/XML layer
  • Semantic HTML
  • Latest CSS techniques
  • Multimedia
  • Tools of the trade
  • Emerging technologies, like AI

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 except as a content consumer.

Disclaimer

This website is a personal project and does not represent my employer.