In May 2018, I became self-employed as a contract technical author. I needed to set up a company quickly as I was starting a short-term contract in Media City, Manchester. The next 5 years or so were spent being hired by multiple companies for short, and long-term, contracts and it was excellent.
The life, whilst I was working and earning, was excellent. Even being forced by my accountant to give up work for a month, or else face the wrath and hassles of having to go down the VAT route.
Then it went all a bit wrong
However, in September 2023, after my last contract, everything went pear-shaped. HMRC/The Government had decreed that all Outside IR35 contractors, like myself, were “dodgy” as we weren’t paying our full share of tax. This was a bit of an insult as I’d made sure that I’d covered all of my payments and on time too. So the market for Outside IR35 roles dried up to almost nothing. All contracts were now going to be Inside IR35, whereby you go through a payments company and they take the tax/NI off directly (for a fee!) and then pay you into your account afterwards.
I struggled to find a role and, in the end, this led me down the path of having to sign on for 12 months. Not a great time at all. Eventually got a LinkedIn message in April 2025 for someone I used to work with. He’d mentioned that a company he’d worked for previously were after a technical author, so I contacted the person in question directly on that same day (Tuesday). By Thursday I’d had the interview and the job was offered the next day!
Back in March I applied for Mee Docs Ltd to be closed down via DS01 request. This was (finally) agreed on July 1st. I can say that contracting was good for the 5 and a bit years that I did it, but the rule changes by HMRC made it nigh-on-impossible to continue. So I had to survive on the meagre amount that DSS gave, plus bi-weekly visits to a food bank.
Whilst all this was going on, I lost my mum to cancer in February 2024. I was also seeing various consultants about aspects of my health that weren’t “working”. By the end of 2024, I’d been diagnosed with:
- arthritis in both feet
- ostheo-arthritis in both knees
- high blood pressue (I wonder why?!)
- put onto statins
- A gall bladder removal op – which had been postponed from March as …
- sleep aponea was diagnosed during my pre-op!
- The operation finally went ahead in September, but 3 days before it, Type 2 Diabetes was added to the list!
Generally, the 18 months (Sept 2023 through to March 2025) have not been the best of times at all, but it’s all behind me now.
Experience / Knowledge / Skills
- Documentation: Creation, Proofreading and Fixing. Single files or in bulk on CVS/SVN repositories.
- Office 365 support.
- Main Office apps of Word, Excel, PowerPoint – all three to macro level if required.
- SharePoint (mostly web front end creation)
- Confluence (handling multiple spaces and bulk conversion of OneNote notebooks)
- Running a TWiki / MediaWiki based Knowledge base, but then converting it to SharePoint.
- General upkeep of Knowledge bases using multiple tools.
- RoboHelp HTML helptext
- DOS, all flavours of Windows and basic Linux command-line.
- Documented / worked with SaaS, IaaS and PaaS systems.
- UX design via Axure for internet sites.
- WordPress – basic site admin etc. I use WP to power multiple websites of my own.
- See one, do one, teach one (I can’t escape my old helpdesk mantra, even if that was 20+ years ago)
I am not looking for any work as I’m currently employed at Dstny.
Contract Work Done (& Doing)
This page, and any sub-pages that follow, will follow my career progress as best as I can. Due to some of the work I do, I won’t be able (sometimes) to go into any detail other than a basic location / job role.
| Position / Date | Overview |
|---|---|
| Technical Author / May 2018 | Working for Auden. A 3.5 week contract to help bring a range of documents up to date. They were mostly Word-based documents, along with a few Visio diagrams along with page updates on Confluence. |
| Technical Author / June 2018 - March 2021 | Sole technical author for a government institution. Contract wasn't renewed due to COVID-19 rules and a lack of work that I could do from home. (Took 2 months off work.) This role involved a wide-range of skills including: updating/creating Word documents, updating/programming macros for Excel (inc. development of a Code Library for others to use) and updating a large selection of Confluence spaces and pages. This was using the non-cloud variant of Confluence. During the COVID period I was working from home and helped to convert a series of OneNote notebooks into Confluence pages using the cloud version of Confluence. The last task I was asked to do was to help extract content from the main SharePoint site and place it into a new sub-site then expand the content. I was also asked to write a guide on how to add / edit new pages and their content. The guide was placed on a Teams Wiki as well as made available in PDF form. |
| Technical Author / June 2021 - January 2023 | Working for Iron Mountain as a technical author supporting a government project. This involved getting documents from SMEs and tidying them up, issuing them to clients etc. Created a Google Sites page to help me track the progress of the updates. Initially a 3 month contract that was extended multiple times until the end of January 2023. |
| Technical Writer / March 16th 2023 | Working for THG (The Hut Group) on a six month contract as their first ever Technical Writer. |
Pro-Bono work undertaken
Pro Bono work undertaken
I've been helping out others for years (and years), but since I launched Mee Docs Ltd, I've decided to keep a record going.| Who for | Description of work undertaken |
|---|---|
| "Fish & Chip" website in Plymouth (Can't remember name!) | Suggested a few changes to the creator of the website and ended up reviewing every single page and suggesting fixes. |
| Atari Legend | Reviewing all of the interviews / reviews on the website as and when asked. |
| Appvertise | Reviewing all of the text within the app and accompanying website. |
| ISTC website | Converting articles from older issues of The Communicator magazine from PDF into WordPress pages. |
| Breakin' The Borders (All three volumes) | Proofreading of the translated text (originally written in German, machine translated via DeepL) for the English versions of all three books. https://www.microzeit.com/anthology/ |
| Woad Farm | I was staying here as part of my long-term contract, so I ended up being their unofficial Android app support as well as helping them with their own website queries - initially through the now defunct Web Eden-hosted site and then moving their site into a WordPress one using SiteGrounds. |
| TCUK Metro 2020 website | Helping more with the tech support for WordPress than actual text editing etc. |
| Crackers - The Gold Rush (Volumes 1 & 2) | Working on the English translated text (the initial pass was via DeepL) for Marco Breddin's latest opus. https://www.microzeit.com/atari-store-1/crackers-the-gold-rush-1/ |
| Atari Legend | A seemingly never-ending flow of work. From editing interviews done in French, then part-translated and reviewing the English versions, through to filling in details about the thousands of games that are hosted on the website's database backend. A side project is extracting all scrolltexts (where possible) from the CD (compacted disks) aka "menus" that the various cracking / packing groups did back in the late 80s to the early 90s. My old but basic 68000 skills are in use once more - along with WinHex (a modern hex editor) to extract the text. |
| Shaun McClure's A Guide to ZX Spectrum Adventure Games - 1982 - 1985 | Working with the author reviewing the whole book. Using Word as the main editing tool to review the 180+ reviews and fixing any errors found. Enjoyable project. Paid in more Hobgoblin Beer than I could drink and a copy of the book for myself and the Retro Computer Museum :) |
| Shaun McClure's A Guide to ZX Spectrum Adventure Games - 1986 - 1987 | Working with the same author reviewing the sequel to previous book. Using Word as the main editing tool to review the 200+ reviews and fixing any errors found. Enjoyable project. Paid in Staw Wars themed beer and a copy of the book for myself and the Retro Computer Museum :) |
| Shaun McClure's A Guide to ZX Spectrum Adventure Games - 1988 - 1990 | Third book in the series. All proofreading done in Word. Book not gone to press as of yet (June 2024) |
| Boriel Basic for ZX Spectrum: A guide for dummies…and those who are not so much | Proofreading the Spanish to English translation along with other volunteers. Received a personally signed and dedicated copy of the book from the author. |