Welfare to six figures, one episode at a time.

I came up in the blogging era, back when the internet was mostly weirdos writing long posts for other weirdos, and I loved it there. I trained as a writer. But here is the part that never made it onto a resume: in 2010, when I taught myself podcast editing, I was a single mom on welfare. Audio made sense for one reason. It was work I could do from home, late at night, with free software and an unreasonable amount of Google, while my daughter slept.

The developer shows I produced became the strangest graduate program of all time: over 10,000 hours of engineers explaining their work directly into my headphones while I cut out the coughs and the “um”s and that one guy’s squeaky chair. I have absorbed so much knowledge about Kubernetes this way. I never asked for it. It came anyway, one episode at a time, and now I can hold my own in an observability argument, which is a sentence past me would have needed several follow-up questions about.

Here is the thing that surprised me: all that listening made me good at marketing. It also paid the bills, then more than the bills. The short version is welfare to six figures. The long version contains an amount of unglamorous editing that would frighten you. When you’ve heard a thousand engineers explain a thousand launches, you know precisely where the explanation loses the room. So the podcast work became social work, and the social work became strategy work, and eventually companies like Honeycomb, thoughtbot, Netlify, and Kilo Code were handing me their accounts. Results followed. A tweet I wrote got 24 million impressions after Elon Musk amplified it, and I had to act normal about that for the rest of the day. I shipped 2,899 posts in one quarter. That is not a typo, and yes, I counted.

These days I run DevReps LLC out of Red Lion, Pennsylvania, producing shows like Hanselminutes, ghostwriting for founders, and running social media for dev tool brands worldwide. If you’re building something good and too busy to tell anyone, I’m the person you call. I read every message myself, usually with headphones on.