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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I should be bilingual. I grew up in a country where the indigenous language isn’t English. But given that it’s been 741 years since Wales was annexed by England, it’s not that the …
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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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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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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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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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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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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’m somewhat behind with translating the older content on this site into French). It’s a fair assumption that, most of the time, …
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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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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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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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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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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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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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