When I was a technical writer at Google, offsites were common. These were useful opportunities to not just connect with your peers, but discuss the issues, challenges, and innovations that affected our customers and our craft.
Of course, you can’t have an offsite without an ice breaker. Which is strange, because most of us don’t like ice breakers. In fact, I remember one year I was in charge of the ice breaker, and my ice breaker was: There is no ice breaker. I made so many friends that day.
One year, the icebreaker took on a more artistic approach. We had to draw our life path. Let me write that again. We, a group of writers, had to DRAW our life path. This path was to illustrate how we got to where we were today. I learned a lot about my peers. Some of them were software engineers. Others were lawyers. A few, like me, were poets or musicians who quickly realized that we weren’t going to pay rent writing brooding poems or playing in rock bands on weeknights. (I did both, believe it or not.)
I learned a lot about my peers that day. And my respect for each of them deepened.
As I sat down to write this book, I realized that I couldn’t talk about my perspective on quality without at least giving you a sense of who I am and how I got here.
The following chapters show how my path started. The ones after show where it’s led since.