It's coming up on a year since I joined the All LED Lighting community and began the writing phase of my career.
Before this, my professional career was a medley of stints alternating between engineering and marketing. During the engineering phases of my career, I designed and developed electronics for radar displays and aircraft fuel and lighting systems. On the marketing side, I performed market research, wrote specifications, and defined requirements for bar-code scanning equipment and military computer peripherals.
Prior to All LED Lighting however, there was no professional writing -- just plenty of product briefs and product literature and a few technical reports. I always had an interest in writing, and All LED Lighting was my foray into the craft.
It all started with an email and subsequent phone conversation with Lee Goldberg, the founding editor at All LED Lighting. He and I shared passions for lighting, aircraft, and flying, and we quickly developed rapport. Shortly thereafter we met at LEDucation in New York City, and the rest is history.
The bloggers on All LED Lighting write articles that run between 600 and 800 words long. It doesn't sound like a lot, and at first glance it would seem that it should be easy to knock one out in a jiffy. But often the pieces require additional research or, at the very least, some deeper thought. I wind up blazing a path at, oh, maybe five words a minute. I doubt I'll ever be the world's most prolific writer.
Research
Writing is a learning experience that is both rewarding and satisfying. Some of my articles, such as To the Moon (discussing the use of the visible spectrum for communicating with spacecraft) and Luminous Efficacy of Radiation (discussing a new potential metric for improved heat sink calculations), required significant research.
While performing research for other articles, I have uncovered surprising artifacts and information. For example, I learned about the 2012 revenue ranking of the LED manufacturers and their respective geographic areas. I naturally assumed China would be the dominant LED supplier, given its dominance in most other manufacturing sectors, but it isn't so.
Inspiration
Many of my ideas for articles come from my current projects. I am working on two UV LED applications, and they will definitely be the source for future blogs. There are far fewer suppliers of UV LEDs than visible LEDs, and data, standards, and performance are well behind the more mature visible wares. Some UV LEDs are manufactured by big-name suppliers, notably Nichia and LG Innotek, while most are produced by smaller organizations, such as Cystal IS, SETi, OSA Opto, and LED Engin. The UV LED industry is probably around 10 years behind the visible LED industry in terms of efficiency, output maintenance, and standardization.
The most gratifying part of writing however, is the connection with the people in the lighting community. A big thank you to you, the readership, to my esteemed colleagues for the help and sometimes spirited debates, and to Keith Dawson and Lee Goldberg, who gave me the encouragement and support to write professionally.
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