I’m Cyn Armistead Newman, Senior Customer Solutions Engineer for a B2B SaaS firm in Pittsburgh, PA. 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:
- Lessons from 30 Years of Working Remotely
- My Support Philosophy: Love Everyone – 15 November 2016
- The Benefits of Maturity – 23 October 2016
- I collaborated with some other remote workers on an article for Remotive’s blog, 11 Productivity Hacks To Get The Most Of Your Remote Life – 18 October 2016
- How to Get Effective Technical Support – 16 November 2016
- Inside Support Driven interview from February 2021
- Women Who Code Alumni Spotlight from September 2017