A year learning a language with Duolingo
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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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