Hello! I have been in IT for close to 9 years. I started out in tech support before moving into system administration. Eventually, I went back to school for Computer Science and for the last 3-4 years have been working as a software engineer. I've seen or touched a little bit of everything in the software life-cycle.

I got laid off in October and it made me realize that I'm burned out. While I do enjoy problem solving & coding, it's exhausting to be in left-brain mode all day. I'm more of a creative/big-picture person and have always enjoyed writing, so when I stumbled across technical writing as a possible career move it caught my attention.

I wanted to get some feedback regarding experience & writing samples. Most of the docs I wrote were either knowledgebase stuff which I don't have possession of anymore. I do have an unpublished manuscript for a scientific paper that I wrote as part of my undergraduate research assistantship (it was intended to be published in a computational biology journal, but I started working full-time and decided not to pursue publication/graduate school).

The paper discusses how we, the developers of a biological simulation framework, "ate our own dog food" by working with an epidemiologist to simulate a model of airborne disease. It explains the details of the model, the results we discovered, as well as how the "dogfooding" process acted as a quality assurance methodology for our software.

Considering I don't have access to any of my old documentation work, would providing the abstract/intro for that paper be an acceptable "sample" - or should I spend a few weeks collecting some open source contribs?