I didn’t start out aiming for a global career in technical writing. I just wanted to share what I was learning, so I wrote blog posts on Dev.to and Hashnode about backend engineering concepts. Those posts led to my first paid articles for Twilio and Honeybadger. From there, I found open source, contributed to projects that reached worldwide audiences, and in 2022, joined Google Season of Docs with Open Food Facts. These experiences opened the door to working full-time with international companies like Rocket.Chat and Macrometa.

In this lightning talk, I'll walk you through the key turning points of that journey. We'll talk about how publishing on your own platform is the first step to building a portfolio that gets noticed, the secrets to landing your first paid writing gig, and how open-source collaboration became my ticket to global credibility and career opportunities I never expected. This talk will also extend in sustaining your technical writing career in this AI era.

If you’re wondering how to turn technical writing into more than a side project, you’ll leave with a clear, practical path to grow from local beginnings to a global career and hopefully the spark to see your documentation as a passport that can take you anywhere.