I have over 20 years of experience in the business of “content.” Between my personal interests and my workplace experience, I am familiar with almost every medium of content, from the written word to the moving picture to the world of online media. I’ve always prized the ability to do things for oneself. For a contemporary writer, that means doing much more than writing, and over the years I have expanded my creative and technical skills.
- Text: I have worked as a writer, research, and editor, working in everything from journalism to enterprise-level customer service to information security in regulated industries.
- Photography and Video: I started out with film, but over the years began focusing on digital photography using mirrorless and DSLR cameras that give me the ability to create beautiful photos and video.
- Web: I built this site and others using WordPress, an open-source content management system (CMS). When I first created this website in 2013, about 17 percent of all websites used WordPress. In 2022, 43 percent of all websites use WordPress.
- Starting in 2012, I taught myself HTML, CSS, and some PHP to create custom WordPress solutions.
- I don’t focus on WordPress as much at the moment, instead using tools like Markdown, Sphinx, and Jekyll to create quality software documentation and tutorials, including a spinoff website focusing on my infosec-related technical writing, Massolit Media Technical Writing Services.
- Information Security: I’ve been interested in information security (or “cybersecurity”) for a long time. I earned the CompTIA Security+ certification in April 2019 and the CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst+ certification in March 2022 . I hope to leverage my existing skills—with content—to teach people about information security and how to stay safe in our networked world.
- Information Technology: Working as a technical writer in the telecommunications and medical device industries motivated me to study the things that power our online world, and the management methodologies that we use to develop those platforms and technologies.
- For example, this website is hosted on an AWS EC2 server that runs CentOS with Nginx, MariaDB and PHP-FPM. To build and maintain it I learned a lot of Linux system administration, as well as tools like SELinux and firewalld. I also documented my creation of a local WordPress development environment that I created with containers created from Dockerfiles and Docker Compose.
What’s a Massolit?
When I started this site, I wrote it up like I was a creative services agency that could create WordPress sites, events, videos, and the photos and words to go with all of that. To be clear, I’ve never actually followed through on any of that, and my career has moved in a different direction since. I gave this fictitious agency the name “Massolit Media,” partly because I didn’t want to buy a URL that was just my name.
Well, I’m a writer, so, predictably, it’s a literary reference. As any fan of Mikhail Bulgakov’s great work of satire and magical realism, The Master and Margarita, Massolit is “one of Moscow’s largest literary associations.”
Massolit’s quarters at Griboyedov were the best and most comfortable imaginable… Any visitor who came to Griboyedov immediately realized, unless, of course, he was a complete ninny, how good life was for the fortunates who were members of Massolit. He would soon become green with envy and curse the heavens for not having blessed him at birth with the literary talent, without which, naturally, one could not even dream of possessing the brown, gold-bordered Massolit membership card that smelled of expensive leather and was known to all of Moscow.
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor, Vintage International, 1996