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After nearly 50 weeks, it’s time for me to close my career break and re-enter the familiar highs and lows of full-time work.

I went into the break imagining long, uninterrupted silence. I expected the solitude. I didn’t expect to miss talking to people as much as I did. For someone who sits slightly on the introverted side of things, it was a surprise to realise how much my mind depends on conversation—on that small spark that jumps between people when the right question is asked. It was also one of the reasons I felt ready to return. I’m in the prime years of my working life, and I want to spend them immersed in collaboration rather than orbiting it from a distance.

During the break, I found myself rethinking the work of a technical writer in a year filled with noise, speculation, and small pockets of clarity. I now think of technical writing as something shaped by humans and machines, each with their own strengths. I had a chance to talk through those early thoughts and write a little about them.

This was also a year of watching the fear and confusion around technical writing and AI. My view remains simple: AI is a tool. Useful when used well, unhelpful when not. I saved time with it, then spent twice as much trying to make it understand what I wanted. Strangely, I was more patient with the machine than with humans. I’m still thinking about what that says. It was a reminder that tools change—but the craft, and the expectations around it, still need human judgment.

Somewhere in all this, I finally learned to relax without guilt—a life skill I wish someone had taught me much earlier. I made space to feel the sting of rejected applications without letting it define me. That discomfort became a quiet tutor, nudging me to reassess what a technical writer really does and what kind of writer I want to be.

I let myself chase ideas without a roadmap. I vibe-coded whenever something caught my attention or when a small itch needed scratching. I built a Readest-to-Readwise highlights importer, a LinkedIn carousel builder that uses Markdown, and a Google Sheets–to–JSON converter to clean up my book library.

I read a lot of books in my yearly pursuit of a hundred, and an unreasonable number of web novels—mostly in the litrpg and xianxia genres. I binge-watched K-dramas and anime, and at 1.7× speed, discovered that Japanese sounds strangely soothing and mellifluous to my ear in a way Korean doesn’t. A highly specific discovery, but a delightful one.

And on some mornings, I took post-breakfast naps, the kind of indulgence that only makes sense when you have nowhere urgent to be. Somehow, the post-lunch siesta never caught on.

All of this taught me to let life unfold without forcing it. It reminded me that being a small fish in a big pond is often the healthiest, happiest place to grow. It quieted that background hum of “What next?” that had shadowed me for months.

Now, as I return to work, I’m stepping in with clearer intent, grounded expectations, and a renewed respect for the simple act of showing up, connecting, and doing the work with others.

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The 2 Types of Value - Or, Why We Struggle to Explain Ourselves to Others by Jay AcunzoJay Acunzo (Jay Acunzo)
Jay Acunzo on the difference between discovered value and apparent value, and three distinct phases of clarifying each type to others.

I’ve always been proud of my work. For years, I described what I did with a statement that felt right:

"My mission is to collaborate with organizations to help people understand and use software better."

It was a good, honest statement. It explained what I did and how I worked. But something about it never quite fit. It focused on the process, not the outcome. It said what I did, but not why it mattered.

That thought lingered until I read Jay Acunzo’s piece on two kinds of value. He talks about:

  • Apparent Value: the benefit people recognize right away, the thing that connects to what they already want.
  • Discovered Value: the deeper benefit they notice later, once they’ve experienced the work.

Reading that helped me see my old statement differently. It was about discovered value—the appreciation that comes after someone works with me. But it didn’t lead with the apparent value, the outcome that matters most to users and teams.

So I rewrote it:

I help users succeed by delivering the right answers, in the right format, right when they need them.

The first part, “I help users succeed,” is the apparent value. It is clear and outcome-focused. The second part, “by delivering the right answers, in the right format, right when they need them,” hints at how I get there. It gestures toward the deeper value of good documentation without getting in the way.

That small change reshaped how I talk about my work. It shifted the focus from the mechanics of what I do to the result it creates. Now my statement felt a bit stronger than before and useful. Rewriting my mission statement using this lens was a small change, but it shifted my perspective. Clarity is not only about doing the work well; it’s about helping others see why the work matters.

It also leaves me with a question. As technical writers, how often do we describe our work through the discovered value—clarity, accuracy, usability—without first naming the apparent value that others can immediately relate to? And what might change if we led with that? I explored that in more detail in my latest PaperArrow post: Apparent and Discovered Value in Technical Writing.

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On this day in 2002, I walked into my very first job at Angler as a Content Developer.

It was the beginning of a journey I couldn’t have fully imagined then, one shaped by learning, change, resilience, and growth. Over these 23 years, I've had the privilege of working across different roles and domains, each one adding its own layer of meaning and experience.

One thing that hasn’t changed is my curiosity. The same inquisitiveness that lit up my first day still drives me forward — to ask better questions, seek deeper understanding, and stay open to the unknown.

I've made my share of mistakes too, and I’m grateful for every single one of them. They’ve taught me humility, perspective, and the value of continuous reflection.