A year of learnin’ and growin’. This year I decided to slow down. It took me many months to wake up to the pace I was moving at. A great book (Essentialism) helped me jettison the things that weren’t serving me.

Open source

TYPO3

• Contributed in the Content Team as an editor and writer. We had a bumper year, publishing over 100 community-contributed articles.
• Officially stepped away from the Documentation Team.
• Continued my community membership in the TYPO3 Association.
• Was invited to be a member of the TYPO3 awards jury panel for T3CON23. It was a great experience!

The Good Docs Project

• Co-led the Content Strategy Working Group, and was involved in a few other working groups across the project (style guide, template audit, and blog).
• Consciously stepped away from contributing to this project in June. It was a great decision for me.
• I’m on the steering committee and continue to do socials on LinkedIn.

Open Strategy Partners

I spent another year working with Open Strategy Partners. I get to work with awesome clients, learn from smart colleagues, do interesting stuff, and meet fun people. This year we got into SEO-based briefs and wrote lots of longer form articles. I interviewed people for our podcast, Communicate, Connect, Grow. We continued our practice of gratitude and I’m grateful that OSP offers psychological safety so that we can make mistakes and learn from them.

Books I’ve read

• Cultivating Content Design - Beth Dunn
• Everybody Writes 2nd edition - Ann Handley
• Designing Connected Content - Mike Atherton, Carrie Hane
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less - Greg McKeown. Very impactful for me!
• The Art of Gathering: How we meet and why it matters - Priya Parker
• Before & Laughter - Jimmy Carr
• The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma - Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar

Events

• I presented at the Everything Open 2023 conference in Melbourne.
• Thorougly enjoyed IPED’s Editing in an age of change workshop by Alice Grundy.
• Attended the ASTC conference 2023.
• Helped organize the Write the Docs Australia 2023 conference. Also evaluated submissions for the conference, and hosted a discussion panel on ‘Tech Comms Today’.
• Submitted to Everything Open 2024 conference in Gladstone.

Writing & editing

Foster

• I started contributing as an editor in this writers’ collective. The minimum requirement is to edit three pieces a month and I average about five. It’s been thoroughly enjoyable and I get to edit a wide variety of content across multiple genres.
• I earned 100 ‘Thanks’ tokens in the first month (yay!) and I’m working steadily towards getting my first paycheck.
• Participated in Season 3 The Artisan’s Way and had my mind blown.

Technical Writing Process book

• Continued on the project to co-write (with an impressive bunch of tech writers) the 2nd edition of the popular book, Technical Writing Process, by Kieran Morgan.
• Met Kieran in person at the ASTC conference 2023.

My website flicstar.com

• Migrated all my Hashnode blog content to flicstar.com. Still need to decommission that!
• Worked out how to use my blog categories. Moved my About page to the front.
• Shared blog posts on social media (again) and was more active and involved on LinkedIn.
• Continued to build and engage with my network.