2025: The Year in Review
As 2025 comes to a close and this blog enters its fifth year, it’s time to return to the well for a look back on the year and, because it’s a year with a 25 in it, the last quarter …
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As 2025 comes to a close and this blog enters its fifth year, it’s time to return to the well for a look back on the year and, because it’s a year with a 25 in it, the last quarter …
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Giving the keynote at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in 2001, writer Douglas Adams said: “I may not have invented artificial intelligence, but maybe I can claim to be the father of artificial …
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I should be bilingual. I grew up in a country where the indigenous language is not English. But given that it’s been 741 years since Wales was annexed by England, it’s not that the Welsh …
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Let’s address the transparent elephant in the room first. I don’t love Liquid Glass. It’s fine on my iPhone. The corners are too rounded on my 6.8 inch CarPlay display. If you have …
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Earlier this month, OpenAI launched GPT-5, its latest and most advanced AI model, for all ChatGPT users (including free users). The company claims the model is smarter, faster and more useful, …
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This is the story of how an unloved mobile video game that was abandoned after four years was revived by Netflix and became a better gaming experience than the more successful title it was based on. …
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I did my journalism training at the London College of Printing back in the last century when newspapers were still a thing. It was essentially a 13 week NCTJ training course (without NCTJ …
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On a personal level, the last 12 months have been a lot. I stopped posting weekly updates back in June 2024 and I’ve been posting on an ad hoc basis since then. This probably explains why I …
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I’m old enough to remember when web apps were written to work with Internet Explorer 6. Thankfully, the days of being dependent on specific browsers are mostly consigned to the past. But one …
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I was recently asked for my favorite resources and best practices for writing clear and structured API docs. I’ve developed my own style for writing API docs, but up until now I haven’t …
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In January last year, I was up for a documentation manager role and I needed to come up with a solution that would serve the needs of writers and developer-contributors. My solution looked something …
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I’ve retroactively decided to return the Byte High, No Limit blog to a regular cadence. For the first two and a half years of its run, I published a new article every Thursday. But other …
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For the last two years, I’ve made predictions for the year ahead. Well this year when I looked in my crystal ball, I didn’t like what I saw. So I’m changing the format. Instead of making …
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Next year is the third anniversary of this blog. But this year, after two and a half years of publishing weekly articles, I had to take a break. After a sojourn in developer relations and solutions …
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Some time around 2010, my friend Bruno Florindo made contact with former Timex Computer boss Lout Galie. I provided the questions, Bruno conducted the interview and I wrote up the response for the …
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In 1983 Teresa Maughan graduated from the University of Reading with a bachelor of science honors degree in Psychology and Zoology. She wanted to work in television, but she ended up becoming one of …
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Today is the two and a half year anniversary of this blog. That’s one article a week over the last 130 weeks. I always intended to scale back the amount of time I spent on the blog this year. …
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This week at work we launched a combined user documentation, REST and GraphQL API portal for a new product. I’m very happy with how it turned out. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on …
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This week I read an article in the national newspaper I subscribe to with the subhead: “carmakers appear to be abandoning the idea of fully self-driving cars.” It mentions that the recent French Open …
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Like many boys before me, as I child I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I made Airfix models of Mustangs and Messerschmidts. I went to the Wales Aircraft Museum (closed in 2000) and sat in fighter …
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This is mainly a tech blog, and I normally steer clear of politics. But having spent 80% of my life at this point living in the UK, I still take an interest in what’s going on. I used to be a …
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In the first part of this article, I got as far as “Invader Zim”, which laid the foundations for what came next. The 2010s is considered by many as the start of a cartoon renaissance. This …
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I thought a list of animated shows would be a relatively quick article to write. I was wrong. There’s no way to do it justice without taking at least a brief look at the recent history of …
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Rebecca Bettencourt was drawn to computer programming from the age of 10, when she built her first website and started creating Macintosh bitmap fonts using only a resource editing tool. I first …
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On March 28 Andres Freund discovered malicious code in the XZ Utils package that could have compromised the security of around half the servers on the internet. The attack was audacious in its scope, …
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Earlier this month, Zilog announced that it would be discontinuing the Z80 microprocessor after 48 years of production. Coincidentally, 48 is the number of kilobytes of RAM in the Z80-based ZX …
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Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is best known as a trilogy in five parts (with a sixth by Eoin Colfer). But before the books came the radio play. And the …
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In a monologue preceding one of his songs, Tom Lehrer once said: “I wonder how many people here tonight remember Hubert Humphry, he used to be a senator. Every now and then you read something about …
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From the mid 1600s until the mid 1800s, the Grand Tour was a trip through Europe (featuring Italy) undertaken by wealthy young men from high society. It piqued in the era of neoclassicism and died out …
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If you work in IT, it can’t have escaped your notice that there are a lot of musicians around, including enough guitarists to fill a stairway. Indeed, one of my former managers was the bass …
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GraphQL is an API query and manipulation language. Created by Facebook in 2012, it was open-sourced in 2015. In 2018 it moved to the GraphQL Foundation and introduced a schema definition language …
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Although I pretty much have this website how I want it now, I’m still tweaking the CSS and adding features. Lately I’ve added some more social networks to the landing page and some more …
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Jeri Ellsworth turns 50 this year. Her first job was building and racing cars, but in 2002 she kicked off the FPGA computer revolution with the C-One. Since 2012 she’s been working on augmented …
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I can confidently predict that I will not still be writing this blog the next time February 29 falls on a Thursday. So today’s article is a little out of left field. I used to read a lot of …
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You might have read about Dr. Mark E. Dean elsewhere this month. Chances are, it was what in newspapers we used to call a “cuttings job”. This is when you assemble an article from previously published …
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I first heard the name Hedy Lamarr in Mel Brooks’ film “Blazing Saddles”. The next time was when as a student journalist in the early 1990s I was trying to interview Tom Lehrer, and …
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My five-year-old iPadPro is the most versatile gadget I own. A few peripherals transform it from a device for consuming content into an incredible productivity tool. And now, thanks to Lux …
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Year one of the calendar in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is 1908, the year Henry Ford introduced the Model-T. As expected, the media duly noted the one hundredth anniversary of …
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Deluxe Paint was a bitmap graphics editor created by Dan Silva and published for the then-new Amiga 1000 by Electronic Arts in 1985. He went on to join the Yost Group with Tom Hudson (who created the …
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This week, I listened to a podcast where the host opened with a sincere apology and the guest made some interesting points about the current social media landscape. Volume is king. Trying to do …
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Andrey John “Andy” Remic was a writer, filmmaker and retro computer enthusiast. In Februart 2022 he died from cancer at the age of 50, leaving behind his wife Linda and two children. …
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It’s been two years since I relaunched my website as a personal portfolio and developer relations blog. Having been a journalist, a marlinspike sailor and a technical writer, I’m finally …
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This is my second go at making predictions for the year ahead. As with last year, I’m not going to make any predictions on geopolitics or the climate crisis and will confine myself to commenting …
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Let me start by saying that I don’t have anything against Python. It’s the number one programming language for a reason. But I learned Perl before Python was invented, and I’ve never …
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It’s been nearly two years since I began publishing a weekly article on this blog. The aim was to serve the DevRel community, and for the most part I’ve stayed on topic. As 2023 comes to …
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Migrating documentation from one software platform to another can be painful. I remember the days when moving a Word document back and forth between Mac and Windows caused problems. I started working …
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Among other things, I’m a car bore. But I’ll try to keep that part brief. In my household, we have two cars: a 2019 e-Golf and a 2013 Toyota 86 (originally sold as the Scion FR-S in the …
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Merriam-Webster describes community as a unified body of individuals with common interests. I’m not sure that I agree. Every community I’ve ever been involved with has factions. In …
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As humans, the two main ways we learn are through play and story. When you’re trying to learn a new task, it’s often easier to learn by trial and error than by traditional instruction. …
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One of my predictions for 2023 was that there would be a lot more talk about Web 3.0. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Global events and the rise of AI have completely overshadowed web …
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single technology in possession of sustained media attention, must be in want of government legislation. And so the governments of 28 nations including …
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Machine translation has come a long way since researchers figured out that it was better to translate phrases than individual words. It works best when there are many texts in the source and …
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After almost 15 years as a technical writer for software companies, I’m a convert to the docs as code philosophy. But while I like Markdown and Git (I use them for this website), I wouldn’t use them …
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I have long been an advocate for localization (even if I am somewhat behind with translating the older content on this site into French). It’s a fair assumption that, most of the time, readers …
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Economist and former Greece finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has a new book out called “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism”. I’m waiting for it to come out in paperback. From the dust …
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This week I presented a talk on CMS, CCMS and related solutions at the TCUK23 technical communications conference in England. I had intended to write up my other idea for a talk as this week’s …
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For those of you who don’t work in video games development, Unity is one of the most popular game engines. It’s particularly popular with independent developers. Last week, without …
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As far back as I can remember, I’ve been a writer. And like most writers, I’m pre-disposed to hoarding. But about a decade ago, when I moved to a small house in London, I decided I had to …
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When I became a developer advocate, one of the first and best pieces of advice I was given was to protect my development time. Essentially, don’t take on so much other stuff that you don’t …
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When I started out as a writer I used to use Oxford English. That’s the one with the (correct) -ize spellings. Although as a journalist I was told to avoid unnecessary punctuation and so I avoid …
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As a solutions engineer, I’ve spent a lot of time on video calls with customers brainstorming solutions to unique problems. Ideally, I’d like to do this in person in a room full of …
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I’ve long been an advocate of localization, which is why it was important for me to make this site multi-lingual. But I’ve been an advocate of accessibility for even longer. So I really …
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If you read my recent article on implementing DLLs for the Z80 CPU, you’ll be aware that I’m designing an operating system called SE/OS. It’s a component of the firmware (System 1) …
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Last week, I wrote about the social media platform formerly known as Twitter (TSMPFKAT). If the T and P are silent, like in tsar and pfennig, it can be pronounced sumf-kat. And I noted that I’m …
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At the end of last year, among my predictions for 2023 was that Twitter would still be around at the end of this year. I may have only been half right. The company is rebranding to X Corp. At time of …
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Converting Markdown to HTML is easy. Just publish it with a static site generator (SSG). But maybe you’re using a cloud-based Markdown documentation solution, and you don’t have a local …
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IT support staff are the unsung heroes of every organization. According to the Gartner Group, between 20% to 50% of all support calls are for password resets. It can take anywhere between 20 minutes …
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Anyone who has used the Windows operating system for any length of time has probably encountered the phrase “DLL hell”, even if they haven’t directly experienced it. The concept of shared …
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There has been a lot of talk in the Irish press this month about the fact that the government doesn’t seem to know how many data centers are present in the country (it’s thought to be …
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My blog articles on the lists seem to be very popular, so I decided to write another one. However, given the subject matter, it seemed more appropriate to write this one in French and then translate …
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I’ve written about REST APIs before, but up until now I haven’t covered the easiest way to get started interacting with them. Created by Abhinav Asthana in 2012 as a side project to …
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This fall, I will have been using Macs for 30 years. I bought my first in my freshman year at university and nicknamed it Fleetwood. Since then, I’ve almost exclusively used Macs. There was a …
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This week, I finished work on the final beta of the classic BASIC interpreter I’ve been working on for the Chloe 280SE FPGA retro computer project. Like many home computers from the 1970s to the …
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I’ve written previously about exporting release notes from Jira in XML format. That was relatively trivial. This week, I needed to export a Confluence page in Word XML (.docx) format. That …
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Since 2018, I’ve been using an iPad Pro as my main personal computer (besides my work laptop). It’s great for all my creative work. But every so often I need to run something that’s …
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I’m a big fan of GitHub Actions. But if you’re working for an enterprise software company, there’s a fair chance you’re using Atlassian’s Bitbucket Cloud (along with …
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One of the challenges of writing a weekly DevRel blog is trying to make sure as many people as possible who might be interested in it actually get to see it. Up until now, I’ve been manually …
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Print is evolving but, after 66 years, the era of the mass-market printed computer magazine is over. The last two holdouts were MacLife (formerly MacAddict) and Maximum PC (formerly Boot). The current …
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This Tuesday, April 18 marked 100 years since the opening of “The House that Ruth Built” or, as it was more commonly known, Yankee Stadium. I was alerted to this fact by an article by Frederic J …
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To date, one of the most widely-read articles I’ve written for this blog was a curated list of podcasts. So here I am again with some off-topic pop culture. And this time I’m not even …
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This week I’m on a 1,500-mile road trip around France, Benelux and Germany in my 10-year-old Toyota 86. When I bought the car, GPS was a US$1,000 option. You had to pay for updates and, if you …
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Back in my days as a newspaper reporter, the last paper I worked on was one of the last in the country to run a stop press. This was a physical mechanism by which the printing presses could be …
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Last week, I wrote about how I added localization to my website. While I’ve translated all the core content, I still have a backlog of more than a year’s worth of articles to translate. So …
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I’m a long-term advocate for localization, but this site has been monolingual for over a year now. It’s past time I started following my own advice. So last weekend I finally got around to …
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I’ve been fortunate in life to work for some companies that were genuinely great places to work. But I have also had the opposite experience. If you have financial obligations, it’s often …
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My first article of 2022 was on setting up a free personal website with GitHub, Hugo, Netlify and Forestry. But Forestry is due to be discontinued at the end of this month. So this is a rework of that …
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You’re probably familiar with the social media memes that try to elicit password reminders from you to access your accounts. For example, your Steinbeck character name is the make of the first …
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As the tech crunch continues, it’s entirely possible that you’re one of the many people who suddenly find themselves looking for a new job. When I started out in tech, some 15 years ago, I …
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Back in 2019, I had to create a developer portal with no budget. I wrote up the experience and last year I published it here as a three part series. My requirements were that it would have the …
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This week, I had a look at the Document Object Model (DOM) for the first time since graduating from my computer science degree over a decade ago. I can’t remember the last time I created a web …
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I’m a huge fan of Markdown. It’s great for wikis and writing content for static sites (most of the content on this site is written using it). But there comes a point in software …
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You’re a developer. Have you ever wondered how the software you write gets into the hands of users? No, me either. In over 15 years in IT, I never gave a thought to the sales process. But in my …
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I’ve mentioned UTM before. It’s a nice wrapper for QEMU that enables you to create ARM virtual machines and emulate non-ARM machines on macOS. It’s a free download from the website, …
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I launched the current version of my website a year ago. Having become a developer advocate in 2021, I didn’t think a WordPress site that hadn’t been updated in a decade would cut it any …
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I like to think that I have a fairly good track record of predicting the future, although usually in fairly vague terms. I’d been waiting for another pandemic ever since I read Michael …
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If you’re reading this then, at the time of writing, thus far, through a combination of luck and guile, you have survived the pandemic. Well done. But what kind of mental and physical state are …
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At the beginning of the year, I committed to publishing a weekly article on my DevRel blog. I always aim to publish by Thursday morning on the US east coast, and I’ve mostly managed to keep to …
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The original Apple iPod was announced on October 23, 2001. The final model was discontinued on May 10, 2022. It wasn’t the first portable MP3 player, but it was the one that entered the public …
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Adobe is 40 years old this month. Founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke both previously worked at Xerox PARC, where desktop publishing (DTP) was first developed. Adobe’s first product was …
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If your documentation has reached the limits of what’s possible in Markdown, and you’d prefer not to fall back to HTML, it’s time to consider authoring in XML. And no, I don’t …
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We love icons. They’re a great way to convey information simply, even if many of them are skeuomorphs from a bygone age. You know, like using a floppy disk ( 💾 ) to mean save; a telephone …
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Photoshop is old. Really old. Well, in computer terms anyway. As of writing, it’s currently on version 24.0. It was originally developed for the Mac in 1987 by Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the …
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I was recently working with some software that could push a zip archive of content to a Git repository. However, what I really wanted was for the contents of the archive to be pushed to the …
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It may surprise you that the field of developer relations has been around for nearly 40 years at the time of writing. It started at Apple with Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki on the Macintosh project. But …
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I’ve written previously about the importance of a style guide for written content. The same is true for code. Arguably, it’s more important because code is much harder to understand. When …
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The hashtag has become ubiquitous. Chris Messina was inspired by the way chat rooms were identified on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers, when he first proposed its use in a 2007 tweet. Since then, it …
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Google for images of agility, and you’ll get dog trials. So let’s go with that analogy. If you create written content for software, going from waterfall to agile can feel like being a dog …
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REST (representational state transfer) APIs (application programming interfaces) have been around since the turn of the century, when they were defined by Dr. Roy Fielding in his doctoral …
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This week, I’m going to take a brief look at intellectual property as it affects developers. It’s a vast topic, but the areas you’re most likely to come into contact with as a …
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In August 2021, TikTok increased the maximum length of videos on its platform to three minutes. By December 2021 it had overtaken Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Netflix to become the most …
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The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and DocBook are two XML-based authoring frameworks. I strongly prefer DocBook. Today’s article is an update of an article on the subject that I …
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As I’ve previously remarked, I missed two things on switching from print journalism to technical writing. I covered style guides last week, so this time it’s editors (I retained the black …
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When I switched from journalism to technical writing, the two things I missed the most were style guides and editors. When tech writing departments are downsized, editors are the first to be let go. …
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Back in March 2022, I did a write-up of how to run Xilinx Vivado on an M1 Mac to generate cores for the Artix-7 series of FPGAs (as used on the Mega 65). The easiest solution is to run the Intel …
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This week’s article is the long-promised expansion of the lightning talk I gave at SUGCON 2022 in Budapest. If you’re coming fresh to the subject, you might like to read my earlier …
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Earlier this year, I gave a lightning talk on API-first. I’ve been planning write an article on it ever since, but first I wanted to lay the groundwork. Last week I covered event-driven …
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Modern software development is all about automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery and software-defined life cycles. The idea is to maintain quality while enabling features to be …
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First off, the obligatory disclaimer. I was gifted an annual subscription to MasterClass by my employer, and I’m not getting paid to write this. There are a vast array of online learning …
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If you’re a Linux user, or you read my article on Scoop, you’ll be familiar with package managers. They aim to simplify installing, upgrading, configuring and removing software. A key …
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In my last article, I wrote a lot about the development of the firmware for my hobbyist microcomputer project that became the Chloe 280SE. In this companion article, I’ll cover the hardware. …
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In this article I’m going to talk about code reuse, reverse engineering and the importance of collaboration. The example I’m going to use is my own hobbyist computer, which evolved into …
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I’ve long been interested in the field known as artificial intelligence (AI). Today, I prefer the term machine learning (because we understand so little about what intelligence really is that we …
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The history of the evolution of consoles and computers is a tangled web. I’ve tried to untangle it a bit. This is a revision of an article I originally wrote for an older version of my website. …
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Today’s article is based on a presentation I gave at a security conference in the 2010s. It’s a bit longer than what I’d normally share, but I think it’s still relevant, …
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Having spent my free time over the past couple of weeks binge-watching all 12 seasons of Tony Bourdain’s award-winning CNN series Parts Unknown (because it’s leaving Netflix in June), I …
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XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language for transforming XML documents into other documents. I’ve mentioned it before in my article on creating release notes from …
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ReadMe.io is a popular user docs site. It has a Markdown editor, theme builder and Swagger / OpenAPI file import. It’s fast and responsive, and it looks nice. But the last time I checked, all …
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If you have even a passing familiarity with Linux, you’re probably aware of the concept of package management. The goal is to simplify the installing, upgrading, configuring and removing …
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In this article, I’ll describe a solution to simplify the process of creating release notes in MadCap Flare from a Jira query. Jira is a popular issue tracking platform from Atlassian. But this …
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I’m a convert to writing docs in Markdown. Most of this website is written using it (displayed with Hugo). But sometimes you need to include a chart or diagram in your docs. Historically, this …
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This week, I’m releasing what I hope will be the penultimate beta of SE Basic IV (an open source classic BASIC interpreter). The last beta should contain the missing sound and graphics …
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Last time I wrote about localization with Weblate. This week, I’ll show how the SE Basic IV project takes JSON output from Weblate and converts it into binaries that can be used with 8-bit code …
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This week, I want to give a shout-out to Weblate, a web-based translation tool with Git integration that’s available free to open source projects. I discovered it by chance because a developer I …
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At the end of last week, I attended a conference in Budapest. I had the opportunity to give a short talk on API First, and I’ll expand on that in a future article. But one of the biggest …
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In my day job as a developer advocate, and in my volunteer role as community manager for the Chloe 280SE project, I’m sometimes called upon to speak in public. But regardless of your job, you …
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One of the things I do is design keyboard layouts and legend designs. My most popular design to date is the Commander X16 professional keyboard. I’ve also created a number of one-off designs for …
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Changing email provider is simple, right? Wrong. After the week I’ve had, I think there’s an argument that you should be able to transfer your email address to another provider, just like …
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I’ve written before about running non-Apple Intel binaries on an M1 Mac. The solutions I discussed work for most general purpose apps, but there was one app in particular that I’d …
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You’ve probably heard of DevOps. You’re probably aware of the term CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery). But if not, the TL:DR is: Continuous integration: Build software locally. …
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Since late 2018, I’ve been developing on Apple Silicon. You can read about it in an earlier article. But that’s using an iPad, and the only native builds I can do rely on an app …
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Next week, I’m going to look at running non-Apple Intel binaries on M1 Macs. But today, I’ll go over some options for running ARM Linux on M1 Macs. Specifically, I’m going to cover …
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In this three part series, I’ll outline how to create a fully featured dev portal for your Swagger or OpenAPI 3.0 content without spending a dime. You can read part one here and part two here. …
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In this three part series, I’ll outline how to create a fully featured dev portal for your Swagger or OpenAPI 3.0 content without spending a dime. You can read part one here and part three here. …
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In this three part series, I’ll outline how to create a fully featured dev portal for your Swagger or OpenAPI 3.0 content without spending a dime. You can read part two here and part three here. …
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This is my 2018 iPad Pro. It has replaced the Hackintosh workstation I built that I ended up installing Windows 10 on (story for another day) as my main computer outside work hours. The only local …
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Back in May 2021 I started a new career as a developer advocate. I first registered my domain back in the 1990s, but it’s really just been a placeholder up until now. It’s also showing its …
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As a writer, Wordle (the latest internet gaming sensation) piqued my curiosity. It’s essentially a word-based variation on Mastermind. The key differences are that instead of six colors, you …
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When I started writing this blog in 2022, I didn’t even have a name for it. It was just called Dev Blog. But it occurred to me that the magazine title that I had parked for future use, “Byte …
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