A tech industry blog

Published on 23 December 2021 by Andrew Owen (2 minutes)

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 High No Limit” would be ideal. And in fact, I’m going to combine selected articles into a magazine format (partly to keep my hand in with page layout, and partly to learn how to use Affinity Publisher).

The origin of the name is as the slogan of a 1980s British computer magazine called “Your Spectrum”. It was never explained, and it doesn’t appear to mean anything. But the magazine itself was technical, yet light-hearted and accessible. Which is about the level this blog is pitched at. There’s now a podcast with the same name, which is the risk you take when you borrow an idea. But I’ve had a store on Zazzle using the name for over a decade, so I’m claiming prior art.

For the first two years, the blog was centered primarily on software development and developer relations, although even then it sometimes went off-topic. In year three the well of ideas ran dry, and so I expanded the content beyond developer relations. I also finally finished translating the entire site into French. I mostly write from personal experience. In the first year, topics included:

• Creative tools.
• Computer (in)security.
• Developer advocacy.
• Dev ops, including continuous integration and delivery in GitHub.
• Doing cool things with XSLT.
• Getting various things to run on a Mac with an ARM CPU that were written for other platforms.
• Mechanical switch keyboards.
• Setting up a developer portal and my own website using static site generation.
• Software development best practices.
• Using an iPad Pro to develop software.
• Why I don’t like the term Artificial Intelligence.
• Writing, editing and localizing documentation.

To make it easier for you to find content that’s relevant to you, I’ve added tagging, search and an RSS feed. You can get to the latter two from the menu. Click any tag in an article to see articles with the same tag. So welcome. I hope you find the blog entertaining, and maybe even useful.

As an aside, I visited the former offices of Your Spectrum in London when I worked nearby, and it’s now a Subway.