About

Welcome to the page for MacDonald Editorial, owned by Brian MacDonald. I reserved this domain for my freelance business a long time ago, but I shut down the service before I finished the site. As a result, this is now a place to keep my résumé, some of my writing, a portfolio of the projects I’ve worked on (in progress), and some other information related to my hobbies.

To put my career history in a more narrative form: I attended Penn State University, majoring in Physics, but I became a writing tutor as a way to earn some extra money. I was trained by Ron Maxwell, who instilled in me the ideas of editing with empathy and focusing on the reader’s needs. I graduated with a degree in English, and went looking for a job in publishing. I didn’t achieve my dream of working for a big publisher in New York, but I worked for Lippincott in Philly in the nursing textbooks group. I got to work on a variety of projects small and large, and developed an appreciation for how much project management goes into each book. In 1996, I moved to the DC area and transferred to Aspen Publishers, a sister company to Lippincott, now defunct. There I worked primarily on medical books, but also other fields such as law, compliance, and fund-raising.

In 1998, I moved to California and achieved my goal of breaking into technical publishing with IDG Books Worldwide, possibly better known as “the Dummies people,” now owned by John Wiley. I started as a copyeditor, then moved to development editor, and eventually became a senior development editor. I primarily worked on the “networking” team, which back then meant lots of study guides for the MSCE and Novell certifications. Although I’d been interested in the topics I worked on before, at IDG I was able to really understand what I was reading, and that made a difference interacting with authors. I’ve almost always gotten along well with authors, but it’s better when you can speak their language. To that end, I also took a C++ class at the College of San Mateo.

By 2001, I moved back to Pennsylvania, the tech bubble had burst (the first time), and companies stopped being supportive of remote employees. Fortunately, publishing has a long history of relying on freelancers, so I was able to transition to working for myself without too much difficulty. Thanks to contacts in the industry and recommendations from authors, I continued to work for IDG, but also added O’Reilly, Osborne (now defunct), Coriolis (also defunct), Manning, and Apress to my client list. Freelancing isn’t the most regular or consistent work, but it provided me with some flexibility while my son was young. I also continued my education, earning a Graduate Certificate in Computer Science from West Chester University. The certificate was created for returning adult students, and was intended to be the equivalent of a B.S. in Computer Science. It included admission to West Chester’s graduate program, but I elected not to continue.

Freelancing allowed me to work with a variety of authors on a wide range of topics, and provided some other opportunities besides. After starting to work with Jesse Liberty on Learning C# 2005, he asked me to come on-board as a coauthor, primarily to write the learning exercises for each chapter. Experiencing the process from the author’s point of view gave me a new perspective on the industry, and a few valuable lessons. Jesse then asked me to join him on Learning ASP.NET 2.0 with AJAX and then on the next editions of both books, Learning C# 3.0 and Learning ASP.NET 3.5. On the C# book, I was more involved with the revision of the content, using what I’d learned to expand and clarify content where necessary, as well as creating all new exercises. In addition, author Chris Fox was impressed with my editing style, and asked me to come to Redmond to give a week-long training to the writers and editors on his team.

My association with Microsoft products eventually led to a long-term contract with them. I was hired as a vendor to write the documentation on custom reporting in Operations Manager 2007. As the product had already been released, and most of the development team had moved on, I had to do a lot of “forensic documentation” to teach myself how the product worked, and learn its features well enough to write about them. Once that intial task was complete, they kept me on to write SDK content for System Center 2012, published on MSDN. In 2012, Microsoft changed their policies and let go all their vendors, but I learned a lot from working at such a large tech company.

In 2013, I accepted a full-time position with O’Reilly, going back in-house for the first time since 2001. I was hired as a development editor, but in O’Reilly’s style, that job expanded quickly. I edited books across the web development and architecture programs, including the first edition of Building Microservices, which became a bestseller. I was also asked to use my Microsoft experience to acquire and edit books in that area, including C# 6.0 in a Nutshell and Programming WCF Services. I contributed articles to the O’Reilly blog, assisted with O’Reilly conferences, primarily Fluent and OSCON, worked on video content, and helped with O’Reilly’s early forays into interactive learning paths. I also greatly expanded my professional network, and began associations with conferences that would continue after leaving O’Reilly, such as Strange Loop and CodeMash.

In 2016, I left O’Reilly and started an association with The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Initially, I worked as a development editor, which I continued to do throughout my time there. I soon realized Pragmatic didn’t have a dedicated acquisitions editor, so I volunteered to take on those duties as well. Doing acquisitions with a broad portfolio was much different than the smaller areas I’d worked in before. I developed my network even further, to reach a variety of areas of programming and operations. Eventually, I was invited to take over as managing editor for the company, meaning that I coordinated our freelance development editors, worked with the operations manager to ensure timely production and publication, reviewed every title to ensure they met our quality standards, onboarded new authors before they were assigned an editor, and also coordinated all marketing activities, including our website, newsletter, and conference participation. Although it was rewarding to be involved in so many facets of publishing, it eventually became clear that I couldn’t be a managing editor, acquisitions editor, and development editor at the same time. We split the management and acquisitions roles, and I transitioned to a role as senior acquisitions editor.

I made a change in 2019, to my employer, if not my function. I joined DigitalOcean to work with their editorial team to expand their Write for DOnations program. It was a successful program, well-regarded by the community, but the volunteer nature of the submissions meant that the program lacked the ability to create longer-form content. I was tasked with finding and acquiring authors to write series of linked tutorials that could form a complete learning path if taken together. I accomplished that with a combination of signing new-to-DO authors from my network, such as Joe Morgan’s React series, and developing existing authors into consistent writers, such as Dusko Savic’s Terraform series. Within two years, unique page views from series tutorials matched those from the Write for DO tutorials. Around that time, my team’s leader left for another position, and I was asked to step up as managing editor for the team. I enjoyed it much more than I anticipated, primarily because I had such an excellent team, they were easy to work with.

In February 2023, DigitalOcean made the choice to lay off a large chunk of the Marketing department, which included the writing and editorial teams for the tutorials. I had the limited comfort of knowing that it was a corporate decision, and had nothing to do with my team’s performance, or my own. I’m proud of the way the teams stuck together, using an external Slack to exchange support and job leads. I was also gratified to be approached by folks who were interested not just in me, but in multiple members of my team. One of those was UpGuard, which I joined in April, along with one of my former teammates. I was happy that I’d helped secure a job for more than just myself, I liked my colleagues at UpGuard, and I very much enjoyed visiting the home office in Sydney. However, I evaluated the situation when I reached the 90-day mark, and decided that the job wasn’t a great fit for me. Starting in September, I took some time to decompress, which I hadn’t done after the layoff, work on some skills, and then get back into the job market.