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I’m Cyn­thia Armis­tead New­man, usu­al­ly called Cyn. I’m the Senior Cus­tomer Solu­tions Engi­neer for a B2B busi­ness intel­li­gence firm in Pitts­burgh, PA. 1See that poll in the side­bar? That’s a small part of what our com­pa­ny does! I’m hap­py where I’m at, but if you like, you can take a look at my résumé. There’s also an arti­cle about my way of pro­vid­ing sup­port and a few links.

I have 25+ years of expe­ri­ence deliv­er­ing tech­ni­cal sup­port. I began doing train­ing and con­sult­ing around 1990. In 1993 I was doing chat sup­port for AOL’s Tech Live Advi­sors. I began work­ing as a sup­port rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Mind­Spring Enter­pris­es in 1995, help­ing their cus­tomers via phone, email, and Usenet (remem­ber news­groups?). I’ve sup­port­ed clients in per­son and by using var­i­ous remote con­trol tools. Along the way, I picked up expe­ri­ence with QA and tech­ni­cal writing.

I’ve recent­ly begun learn­ing more about the devel­op­ment side of tech. I learned HTML in 1995 as part of my work at Mind­Spring and pro­duced my first web­site a short time lat­er. When CSS was intro­duced, I redesigned that site and the addi­tion­al sites I’d cre­at­ed in the mean­time. Most of my sites have been on Word­Press since around 2006. Then I added a lit­tle JavaScript to the mix. I received a schol­ar­ship from Women Who Code and RMOTR to RMOTR’s inten­sive Intro­duc­tion to Python Pro­gram­ming course, so I took that in 2013. I’ve made good use of Codecad­e­my, FreeCode­Camp, LinkedIn Learn­ing, Cours­era, and EdX since then.

My first office job was work­ing for my father in the ser­vice depart­ment he man­aged at a heat­ing and air com­pa­ny back when I was 11 years old. I did fil­ing and data entry, helped answer the phones, and assist­ed the dis­patch­er. Dad­dy seri­ous­ly stressed cus­tomer ser­vice, and I learned from him that it’s vital to treat every per­son like they are the sin­gle most impor­tant indi­vid­ual you will speak to today.

This site con­tains a bunch of old­er arti­cles that I’m slow­ly updat­ing. They show my writ­ing style, but many things have changed in the tech world since I first wrote them. Here are a cou­ple of new­er writ­ing sam­ples and some oth­er stuff:

Any ques­tions?