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New Adventures in 2023

Like many other freelancers, I’ve been in a constant sprint since the pandemic started. I’m getting better at saying “no” to more work, and this holiday season I finally had some time to recharge and reflect. I’ve been inspired by Heather Flanagan’s recent posts to think hard about what I’d like to do in 2023.

  1. I'm looking for new cybersecurity challenges. My focus will still be supporting NIST, of course, but I'd also love some new projects that leverage my technical chops in different ways and make valuable info freely available. The bigger the variety of projects I work on, the more I learn and the better my work becomes.
  2. I stopped doing talks in late 2022, and it’s been a positive change for me; I’m a much better writer than a speaker. I still get a lot of requests to do talks, so I'm thinking about periodically recording videos on hot topics (like SSDF) and making them freely available if there's interest.
  3. 2023 will be the year when I finally launch my pet project, the Technical Writing Playbook (TWiP). TWiP will provide basic guidance on how to write a technical blog, article, white paper, software documentation, and other content forms that techies often need to create in a hurry. TWiP will focus on the key elements of planning and structuring your content, the 20% of the work that provides 80% of the results. And, of course, TWiP will be publicly available.

I'll also be blogging regularly in 2023. You can sign up for a weekly digest of my blog postings and writing portfolio updates on my website.

Doing things like recording videos and standing up TWiP will take a big chunk of my time. Many freelancers are monetizing themselves through subscriptions or services. I prefer to keep all my content accessible to everyone, so instead I've set up a PayPal account for anyone who chooses to contribute. And I'd be happy to publicly recognize contributors if they'd like, probably on the new TWiP site when it launches.

Thanks for all of your support, and here's to a wonderful 2023 for all of us!