why you should hire bforte

Hire bforte

He writes well

I’ve just had one of those pleasant experiences that more than justifies dropping you a line. I reviewed a set of reworked corporate brochures and I was very complimentary about the writing style and content, a brilliant fit for our new Stress-Free Internet re-branding process. And I found out, to my pleasure, who is responsible for that great documentation rewrite… you!
— Simon Hackett, Managing Director, Internode Pty Ltd, 2011-02-08.

Thanks for what you've done already! I think the RHUI book is a lot better.
— Julie Wu, Technical Writer, Red Hat, 2012-11-12.

Totally agree with all of the edits and reasoning. I'm going to use edit 2 for publication.
— Marco Rhodes, Senior Software Maintenance Engineer, 2013-04-23.

He helps others write well

Having my writing edited by Brian has been one of the highlights of my career at Red Hat.
— Joshua Wulf, Senior Technical Writer, Red Hat, 2014-05-07.

During my tenure at Red Hat, I have come to depend on your wisdom and comprehensive answers to technical writing questions. I have found myself wondering what would bforte do when addressing questions from my writing team.
— Misha Husnain Ali, Senior Technical Writer, Red Hat, 2014-05-07.

He works well with others

Red Hat isn’t about making software, it’s about making things better. Brian made Red Hat better.
— David Jorm, Security Engineer, Red Hat, 2014-05-07.

Thank you for all your patient explanations and for making me feel smarter (not dumber, as is standard when speaking to most people with such vast repositories of knowledge).
— Misha Husnain Ali, Senior Technical Writer, Red Hat, 2014-05-07.

He can write and edit anything

marketing copy for Internode, ZDU, the South Australian Writers’ Centre, Recall Design and others.	press releases for Red Hat, Recall Design, the South Australian Writers’ Centre and others.
knowledgebase articles for Red Hat, ZDU, Sun Microsystems, and others.	user manuals for Red Hat and others.
feature articles for The Age, The West Australian, The Advertiser, MacSense Online, ZDNet Online, Australian Jewish News, and others.	courseware for Red Hat and ZDU.
q&a articles for Red Hat, MacSense Online, ZDU, and others.	screenplays two screenplays optioned by 20th Century Fox (both long since lapsed).
fiction short stories published in various places.

He teaches the courses he writes

at Red Hat.

at the South Australian Writers’ Centre.

and for ZDU.

He did social media before it was called social media

Community moderator for ZiffNet/Mac on CompuServe, AOL and eWorld.

SysOp and moderator for ZDU and ZDnet on the web.

He occasionally makes small dents in the universe

[bforte] personally shaped the processes that still form important parts of our business, particularly around Errata and the whole notion of Cause, Consequence, Fix, Result.
— Ruediger ‘Rudi’ Landmann, Manager, Red Hat, 2014-05-07.

His technical essay A4 vs US Letter has been a top-five response returned on the Google search A4 US Letter for more than a decade. (An obscure topic to be sure, but a claim to technical fame no less.)

He won’t waste your time & money trying to switch to engineering

When he wants expressive precision, he uses pure mathematics.
When he wants expressive richness, he uses natural languages.
When he wants neither, he uses programming languages.

He never wants neither.^*

^*He’s happy working with markup syntaxes such as XML, HTML, CSS, Markdown, AsciiDoc, and troff, however.

But wait, there’s more

A self-hosted WordPress-based site presenting some of his journalism.

A work folio available as a PKZip file.

An MkDocs project and itch-scratching exercise.

A résumé in PDF format.

An e-mail link should you want to contact him immediately.