Pacilio-headshot


I’m a Pennsylvania native who loves hiking, gardening, reading, and (of course) writing. My all-time favorite books continue to be Wuthering Heights and Brave New World.

Fun Fact: I skipped math my senior year of high school so I could squeeze in more English electives.

How I became a professional writer

It started at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where I was a Lab Manager orchestrating multi-stage research studies on stress, meditation, and smoking. I routinely taught research assistants to perform complex procedures (like calibrating an eye-tracking machine) flawlessly with hundreds of participants. As you can imagine, my job involved writing a lot of thorough documentation.

I was ecstatic when I learned there are entire jobs revolving around this type of work. A career filled with learning and sharing cool new things? Sign me up!

I immediately enrolled in CMU’s Masters in Professional Writing program, specializing in scientific and technical content, and I’ve been a professional writer ever since.

In my first job, I built an entire set of developer docs from the ground up. I didn’t know anything about building applications at first, so I asked a lot of questions and stayed up late watching videos about databases, APIs, and JavaScript. I loved it.

In a later job, I developed an internal newsletter that helped engineers tell the rest of the company why their work was awesome. I learned about how self-driving cars “see” at night and how the simulation team developed incredibly realistic scenes for testing. I loved that, too.

Throughout my career, I’ve also written UI copy, blog posts, step-by-step manuals, overview pages, documentation templates, and more. I like trying new types of content, and I’m always working to expand my portfolio.

Why I love my job

I genuinely enjoy a challenge. There is nothing more thrilling than tackling a big, amorphous problem. The tech space offers a lot of these types of opportunities.

I also like that good content helps people. It helps leaders express their vision clearly. It helps engineers share their inventions. It helps people do great work.

Finally, working in tech is just so cool. I’ve had the privilege of writing about some of the most transformative topics and products of our generation. My work preserves my sense of wonder and continually makes me excited for the future.