Content Creator? Keep an Articulated and Structured List!

January 15, 2023 Attitude Getting Hired No Comments

Some firms, especially the smaller startups, appreciate when employees create industry relevant content. Others have a definite need to bring on such employees early on. Afterall the first step in the sales process is Awareness. If you’ve been creating content, I suggest you put together a single article that narrates the different topics you’ve produced content on. Articulate the key points you’d like a hiring manager, or hiring firm if you consult, to see. What follows is an example for you to consider if you are a content creator. The need is very similar to keeping your resume up to date.

A friend at a firm I’m speaking with recently asked me to send the industry relevant articles I’ve written. He wanted to share them internally with the hiring team. Rather than send an unordered list of links, I wrote up a few paragraphs. They were in a logical order and had details. It was enough content that I realized I should put it into an article.

Industry Specific

The primary focus for creating content will always be industry-specific to the firm. Since I’ve advised on several technologies while in tech, I’ve broken them out by those spaces here. If I’m speaking with a CAI, APM or CDN firm they can review the relevant section. And the others give a feel how well I can communicate on topics that not everyone in the audience is familiar on.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

The first one related to CDNs was The CRUD to Think About With Modern CDNs. After that I published a high-level intro called The Ease of Getting Your Site on Fastly (an Amazing CDN).

In 2019 I worked a booth at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference. There were experiences that lead to the article “The Blues Brothers and (Relative) Velocity – Have You Heard.” At the time two of the companies I reference were on Fastly, but one hadn’t yet firmed up their messaging. As such I didn’t mention it. That article was also one where I was trying to change up the style to make the article stand out. Related to that attempt to change up the style, “Can You Learn from the Cloud and Be More Secure?” is from when I was at PagerDuty. It uses a Wild West theme (actually Star Wars) to talk about GuardDuty. It has more of a Security slant to it. On the Security topic I’ve got an article on my blog “Authentication? Authorization? What’s the diff?” I haven’t cross-posted it because I think I have one of the analogies off and I need to review again.

My article “Liars and Statistics . . . or Perhaps Accounting?” is a comment on accounting and how companies are able to skew their costs by how they classify different expenses. Personally I think it is shady, but if it is legal – what am I to say?

I published “So You Get the Need for Performance – but How Do You Improve It?” as a way of highlighting my knowledge in how to improve performance. Not CDN-centric, but shows how I understand there are different tech problem causes and different way to solve them. It blends my time in Application Performance Management (APM) as well as CDNs.

The last one I’ll mention is “When a 2% Increase in Cache Hit Rate Can Save You 20% in Data Center Costs.” It is the CDN concept one that I am most proud of. This leads to a nice transition into the Analytics space.

Analytics

I’ve got serious interest in leveraging data to influence decisions. This also extends into taking courses about Big Data. One of the early articles related to Analytics was “Are You Asking Questions the Right Way?” There was followed by “An Example of Poor Domain Knowledge and Analytics” and then “Sales Engineering Is This The Next Place To Be” which has not been cross-posted to Linked In.

Conversational AI

While interviewing with a CAI firm, I wrote “Branding and Your Bot.” Once at Cognigy I wrote two articles that were leveraged when interacting with potential customers. One was “Conversation AI Automation Primer” which was intended for firms new to the space. The other was “Conversational AI Automation Hands On” which I used to help get people started using the technology. This was a nice roadmap for potential customers to get started quickly.

Technology Related

I position myself as a creative problem solver. There are two areas that support this positioning. One is that I’ve spent time as:

A System Administrator back when we had Windows NT, OS/2 Warp, HP-UX, SunOS and Solaris in the data center. SunOS and Solaris are different. You have to spend time with them concurrently to fully comprehend.
A Developer/Coder in multiple languages. A couple of years with Perl and a couple of Java while at Cisco. Quite a few years of Perl after that for Garage City. I’ve also solved problems where C, Go, JavaScript, Tcl/Tk, VCL and even Procomm’s ASPECT. The last one was critical enough that the CEO wanted daily updates.
System Architect. Full Stack when LAMP meant Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl.

I’m a generalist, not a specialist. The more technologies you know about, the more building blocks you have to solve problems quickly.

I’ve found that when people only publish content about where they work they quickly lose readership. I know I don’t want to listen to a broken record on “how clean my shirts can be.” (Rolling Stones if you miss the reference.) Create content across several areas and I’m more likely to follow you.

High Tech Introductions

One that I find interesting to share is “10 Considerations When Selecting SaaS.” This actually points out the flaws with several competing solutions in spaces I’ve been involved with. There are quite a few on my blog that I haven’t posted to LinkedIn. I also wrote one on “Purposeful Learning With Deliberately Insecure Applications.”

Raspberry Pi

When at Fastly a (very sharp) coworker suggested using Raspberry Pi single board computers as part of virtual events. The pandemic had been going long enough that it was hard to stand out trying to get people to attend. We brainstormed and came up with an event that leveraged a Raspberry Pi. This was one that was educational to the point people brought their kids. It also was one that could conclude with a 5 minute demo of Fastly’s differentiations that was shown on the electronics we’d just built.

This experience lead to quite a few articles that demonstrate my ability to handle diverse topics. And if you want to create a virtual experience like this to get an audience with potential customers, reach out to me.

The evolution of these articles started with “How to Include a Raspberry Pi in a Remote Demo” followed by “How to Include a Raspberry Pi in a Remote Demo – Part 2.” After those I had two articles about “Teaching Electronics + Programming Part 1” and a “Part 2.” There also were articles about the items that would “Enhance your Raspberry Pi Experience” and also one on how you could use the “Raspberry Pi400” for these events since the Model 4s were impossible to get in quantity. We often had 50+ attendees for this event.

My Character

Attitude

I like to highlight what I find important from a cultural perspective. That has lead to a large number of articles to highlight my values.

In Conclusion

I hope that this article gave you a quick view of ways to organize a narrative about the content you have created. I’ve also created it as a way of quickly sharing with potentials firms to get hired by or do consulting for. There’s 60 more articles on LinkedIn, all of which are also on my blog. I’ve got another 40 or so on the blog that I haven’t cross-posted to LinkedIn yet. Very diverse topics there, so I’ll be adding more here in the future.

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Start when you don’t need it, keep it current. When the unexpected happens, you’ll be grateful.

Eric Burns Online