add links

Author: devalog

_posts/2026-07-08-one-year.md

@@ -9,15 +9,15 @@ I left Google in January 2025 at the end of my maternity leave. That had never b
 
 ## Figuring out what I wanted
 
-I spent the next few months on a job search that was alternately rewarding and frustrating. I rebuilt my website and built an autogenerated resume as proof-of-competency projects, all while caring for my baby full time. (I had support, though: my in-laws watched him a few hours a week while I applied for jobs and did interview prep, and my husband took the rest of his paternity leave, a few weeks, in February. It was still the most isolating period I've experienced.) I spent a lot of that time trying to figure out what I actually wanted. At first I thought I could make it work with a flexible full-time job, but I just couldn't bring myself to accept any of the full-time offers I got. So I regrouped and focused on part-time work instead, so I could still spend a good portion of the working week with my baby.
+I spent the next few months on a job search that was alternately rewarding and frustrating. I [rebuilt my website](/2025/02/09/jekyll.html) and [built an autogenerated resume](https://github.com/devalog/resume/blob/main/resume.pdf) as proof-of-competency projects, all while caring for my baby full time. (I had support, though: my in-laws watched him a few hours a week while I applied for jobs and did interview prep, and my husband took the rest of his paternity leave, a few weeks, in February. It was still the most isolating period I've experienced.) I spent a lot of that time trying to figure out what I actually wanted. At first I thought I could make it work with a flexible full-time job, but I just couldn't bring myself to accept any of the full-time offers I got. So I regrouped and focused on part-time work instead, so I could still spend a good portion of the working week with my baby.
 
 What I found is that it's incredibly hard to land a part-time job, much less one outside of your network. And while I'd assumed working at Google would give me a built-in network for the rest of my life... almost all of the people I considered my network were still at Google, and therefore not in a position to offer me another job. And I had no interest in trying to get re-hired at Google.
 
 ## Taking a risk
 
 Throughout my search, I received and declined various offers that just weren't the right fit for various reasons. (One company's founder explicitly asked if I had kids during the interview process, for example.) The hardest part was choosing between two very good offers. One was a part-time freelance gig that seemed like truly the ideal gig. At the same time, I was wrapping up a long interview process for a full-time job at a midsize company that seemed about as good as full-time could get: interesting work, a great team, and a real focus on work-life balance. The part-time role was also interesting, but it was so different from anything I'd done before that it felt like more of a risk. I decided on the freelance gig, and declined to continue the midsize company's interview process.
 
-That contract abruptly ended after only two months, when political infighting I didn't have much visibility into stopped work on the product I was hired to document. But I barely had time to be upset about it, or to regret taking it in the first place: a week after I heard it was ending, I got a cold LinkedIn DM from one of Fern's founders, who was looking for a technical writer contractor.
+That contract abruptly ended after only two months, when political infighting I didn't have much visibility into stopped work on the product I was hired to document. But I barely had time to be upset about it, or to regret taking it in the first place: a week after I heard it was ending, I got a cold LinkedIn DM from one of [Fern]((https://buildwithfern.com/))'s founders, who was looking for a technical writer contractor.
 
 ## Starting at Fern
 
@@ -29,11 +29,11 @@ A year later, I still get tagged on documentation-related customer Slack threads
 
 ## Expanding my scope
 
-For my first 4 months at Fern, I did the technical writing and documentation workflow optimization work that I was hired for. Then, in October, there was a lull in product launch content: the person covering it also owned all of business operations, and he no longer had time to write. On October 22, midday, I was asked if I could write a draft. (I had zero marketing experience at this point, and certainly none at Fern.) My first blog post went live the following day.
+For my first 4 months at Fern, I did the technical writing and documentation workflow optimization work that I was hired for. Then, in October, there was a lull in product launch content: the person covering it also owned all of business operations, and he no longer had time to write. On October 22, midday, I was asked if I could write a draft. (I had zero marketing experience at this point, and certainly none at Fern.) [My first blog post](https://buildwithfern.com/post/llms-txt-improvements) went live the following day.
 
-From then on, I owned product launch content, and my ownership kept growing from there. Today, it covers all of Fern's documentation and technical marketing content: case studies, blog posts, product launches, SEO content, social media (LinkedIn/X) copy, Slack blast copy, and the occasional email blast. I do a lot of writing, but just as much editing, nitpicking, and collaborating with engineers.
+From then on, I owned product launch content, and my ownership kept growing from there. Today, it covers all of Fern's documentation and technical marketing content: case studies, blog posts, product launches, SEO content, social media ([LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/buildwithfern_ai-mcp-rust-activity-7458236422798454786-dILk)/X) copy, Slack blast copy, and the occasional email. I do a lot of writing, but just as much editing, nitpicking, and [collaborating with engineers](https://buildwithfern.com/post/faster-docs).
 
-Unsurprisingly, a big part of my job now involves AI. I've been making our docs agent-friendly: tagging content that only AI agents should see, structuring page metadata so agents can decide what's worth fetching, and constantly iterating on the agent configuration for our own docs repo. I recently built an internal automation that scans our code repos every 24 hours, evaluates which merged PRs need a docs update, and posts a draft docs PR to Slack. I built a public repo of docs skills our customers can drop into their own projects, and I help configure Fern Writer, our AI writing agent. For my own work, I have an arsenal of Claude skills covering everything from factchecking SEO blogs to drafting case studies from interview notes. And I blog about technical writing and my own AI-assisted workflow for Fern, which means my workflow has itself become content (it's all very meta).
+Unsurprisingly, a big part of my job now involves AI. I've been making our docs agent-friendly: tagging content that only AI agents should see, structuring page metadata so agents can decide what's worth fetching, and constantly iterating on the agent configuration for our own docs repo. I recently built an internal automation that scans our code repos every 24 hours, evaluates which merged PRs need a docs update, and posts a draft docs PR to Slack. I built a public repo of docs skills our customers can drop into their own projects, and I help configure Fern Writer, our AI writing agent. For my own work, I have an arsenal of Claude skills covering everything from factchecking SEO blogs to drafting case studies from interview notes. And I blog about technical writing and [my own AI-assisted workflow](https://buildwithfern.com/post/ai-assisted-technical-writer) for Fern, which means my workflow has itself become content (it's all very meta).
 
 Owning content at Fern has been the most fun I've ever had with a job. It's very satisfying to write the documentation, then use that documentation as a starting point for a longform blog post, then figure out how to pull out the key point for a LinkedIn post or Slack blast. And all of those assets link to each other: you click it, I wrote it.