Heather Armstrong didn’t mean to become a “mommy blogger”. In 1997, she taught herself to code, and began working at a Los Angeles tech start-up. When she started writing about her life online, her focus was Dilbert-style office politics. The title of the blog, “Dooce”, which eventually became better-known than her own name, came from a misspelling of “dude” in a group chat. Eventually, her unwise online disclosures got her fired — “Dooced”, as the process of sacking incautious bloggers came to be called.
