The Future Of Tech With An Excel Expert

Hey Hackers!

I’m Al Chen and I’m the Solutions Architect at Coda. I am glad to announce that I have been nominated for the 2022 Noonies Award.

A huge thanks to the HackerNoon community and staff for considering me worthy of this opportunity. I’ve been nominated in the following categories and if you like my writing, please do check out these award pages and vote for me:

HackerNoon Contributor of the Year- PRODUCTIVITY

As a tech writer, I believe that the most exciting technology of the present is the document/spreadsheet industry because of the tools it allows us to build for our teams. Learn more about my thoughts and opinions on Coda, documents, and spreadsheets and my journey in the tech industry via the interview below.

1. Tell us about your journey. What do you do and what do you love about it?

When I was a financial analyst, I was stuck in Excel all day. Over time, I realized I was basically building a relational database in a spreadsheet. I eventually became a freelance consultant and was doing Excel consulting. This meant building financial models and tools for my clients. I was experimenting with other technologies and SaaS tools too to help my clients. Google Sheets was really popular, of course, because it was free. The problem is that my clients were asking for stuff to be built in Excel or Google Sheets, but these tools weren’t meant for sales enablement, event production, and CRM. These tools are meant for financial analysis. I love learning how to build stuff in spreadsheets but they were all just hacks. Eventually I joined the Coda team because the product is a document and spreadsheet that is meant for these non-finance use cases.

2. Tell us more about your work. What do you make/write/manage/build?

I spend most of my day building Coda templates and writing content around how to do stuff in Coda. I also try to learn as much as I can about other tools too so I can write more unbiased blog posts. I recently just published this post on Confluence vs. Coda for the team hub scenario and went DEEP into Confluence. Technical writing comes easy to me because it’s a mix of writing step-by-step tutorials (in most cases) but you get the added benefit of sprinkling in emotion and creativity into the content. Who would’ve thought creating B2B SaaS content could be so much fun? For the Coda templates I build, many of them have really fun dummy data. For instance, I really liked the show Billions and incorporate a lot of the characters and plot lines from the show into my templates (see this Critical Path template, for instance).

3. How did you start writing? What made you choose HackerNoon for publishing your work?

I started writing on my Excel blog more than 10 years ago. That’s when I realized there’s an audience out there for “technical” content. I know HackerNoon is the go-to resource for a lot of technical content as well, so it made sense to publish some of my articles on HackerNoon.

4. What excites you in tech? Tell us about your favorite technology and why you are passionate about it.

I’m biased, but Coda continues to excite me (I’ve been with the company for 4+ years). The no-code space is also really interesting because “no code” has been around since spreadsheets have been around. But recently, there has been an emphasis on no-code tools because of how fast online tools can be created these days for non-developers to build stuff. I don’t consider myself a developer and think I’ve been able to build some pretty cool shit so that’s why I think the no code industry is pretty awesome.

5. What were some of the challenges you faced being a tech writer and how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge is learning how to stand out in a sea of technical content that is much better than mine. That’s why I think adding humor and emotion to technical content makes the content different and entertaining. There will always be a place for the step-by-step tutorial type of content that is very black and white. But the best content is the type that blends both the pragmatic and the emotional.

Another challenge is how to not always be selling your product and shilling your bag. The best way to overcome this is just stop doing it! I think writing in a way that is neutral and objective will help you overcome this.

6. What are you learning/reading currently? Any recommendations for our readers?

I’m going to bring this back to Coda again, but right now I’m learning how to build Coda Packs. This is the most “programming” I’ve done in a while but it’s just Javascript scripting. I learned a little about Javascript creating a bunch of Google Apps Script. With Coda Packs, there’s an online IDE where you can basically build an integration between Coda and any other platform or data source that has a REST API. I’ve been reading through the Packs SDK documentation, Googling how to do stuff in Javascript and coming across Stack Overflow articles, and just publishing random shit. For instance, I published this Pack on Owen Wilson’s Wows where you can see all the times Owen Wilson has said “wow” in a move. Pretty random.

7. What is your biggest achievement so far?

In 2019 I had my first big speaking gig at Webflow’s No-Code Conference. I think it was a big achievement because it was the first time a conference flew me out to speak and I had to wear a mic and practice and everything. It was fun explaining my thoughts about spreadsheets and no-code to an audience of no-code enthusiasts.

8. If we gave you 10 million dollars to invest in something today, what would you invest in and why?

The honest answer is index funds. If it’s fuck you money, I’d invest in whatever Elon is working on and developer infrastructure platforms.

9. What advice would you give to someone just starting in this field?

Two biggest pieces of advice is to be consistent and just publish shit. Those two will get you 95% of the way there to becoming a good technical writer and content creator. Most people publish one post and don’t publish for like a year. Other people get scared about publishing and don’t publish enough because they’re afraid of what people might think. You’re publishing technical content; not writing a dissertation on politics. It’s going to be hard to offend someone on how to set up your environment for running Docker images.

10. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

One of my old managers gave me this advice when I was an analyst. Always ask questions and be curious. These two skills have gotten me pretty far with my professional and personal lives.