[Vmody2]

I'm a technical writer for a tech software start-up, but I started in sales. There's always some content that needs to be written. Blogposts, documentation, whitepapers, etc.

I started by... well writing. I wrote a some blogposts, and a few of them trended on HN. Eventually, when we hired our CMO, he saw what I had been putting out and asked me to help out more. At a certain point, it made sense for me to transition entirely to writing.

Since you're not a professional writer, don't expect to be given a lot of writing responsibility. You basically have to prove yourself. If you have an editor at your company, work with them. I didn't have any formal writing training, but I applied the feedback I got from our editor and slowly my quality improved. It took me about 4-5 months before I was fully trusted to write quality pieces without hand-holding.

Given that you're a software engineer, you have the domain knowledge to write some very useful content. It's just about finding your style.