Byte High, No Limit goes monthly

Published on 30 January 2025 by Andrew Owen (3 minutes)

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 pressures on my time meant that eventually became unsustainable. Last year, after I ended weekly publishing halfway through the year, I published four more articles for a total of 30. I think one a month is probably doable, not least because that’s the cadence many YouTubers who used to release new videos every week have now moved to. And quality videos are a lot more work than this. So this year, new articles will appear on the last Thursday of the month.

“The prose world from which I crawled — newsprint and books — is beset by a new economic model in which the value of content is being reduced in direct proportion to the availability of free stuff on the web."—David Simon

In the introduction to his blog, The Audacity of Despair, David Simon makes the argument for writers not giving their work away for free. Indeed, before I became a developer advocate I always adhered to the mantra: “never do for free what you’ve been paid to do.” The two and a half years that I wrote for free roughly corresponds to the two and a half years when writing and editing ceased to be my source of income. In February 2024, I returned to technical writing. And when you write for a living, writing on your own time as well can be draining. But the blog has been something of a brain dump for me, where I can store technical information that I might need again at some future date. This year, I found myself revisiting some of my earliest articles to re-familiarize myself with Swashbuckle.

In the seven years I’ve been in Ireland I’ve had as many jobs, from short contracts to 28 months in a permanent role that I really enjoyed, but didn’t pay enough for me to get a mortgage where I was living. It’s been a real rollercoaster. I had several roles that weren’t what I was led to expect. I got headhunted for a role and then let go a year later due to market changes. When I wasn’t in tech writing, I was making senior developer money. And then I had to adjust to not making that kind of money. I know writers who have been in the industry as long as me who have been out of work for years at this point. AI has turned the industry on its head, and although I’ve been following its development since the 1990s, it’s hard to keep up with the pace of change now.

So for the year ahead, expect industry observations, tools evaluation, writing tips, iPad insights, another article in the retro spotlight series and a look back at the year in December. All of which will also be available in French. And if you enjoy cooking, you may be interested to know that I’m planning to add more recipes to that section of the site. Aside from writing for this site, other personal projects I’m working on this year include a devkit for a retro computer role-playing game, adding RIFF support to my retro operating system and building a document management system that works equally well for writers and developers. Wish me luck.