Byte-Sized Ethics Crosses 500 Subscribers!
To celebrate, I bought a custom domain and I'm offering a year of support for $35!
You know what’s really exciting? Setting a goal or milestone and then achieving it. I recently crossed 500 subscribers (540 at the time of this writing) and wrote my 40th article. To celebrate, I purchased a custom domain - bytesizedethics.io.
I want thank all 540 of you who joined me for this journey so far. I really appreciate your interest in my writing, and I can’t express how great it makes me feel that people want to read what I have to say. Thank you so much for your support.
If you’ve thought about supporting me in the past, but thought the $50 for a year was just too much, I set up a discount to celebrate. You can support me for a year at $35 for a limited time. I would give discounts on the monthly payments, but Substack doesn’t let me know.
As I reflected on the last 10 months of writing, I realized that I had never really explained why the name. While I thought it was a fun and clever name, a conversation with my good friend about the custom domain made me realize that it might be as clear to everyone. So, today's milestone post is all about how I came up with the name.
Why Byte-Sized Ethics?
I had a couple things I wanted to achieve when I started out - I wanted to learn more about responsible tech and responsible AI, and I wanted to help equip other people with this information to be more active participants in the technology that influences so much of our lives.
A byte is one of the building blocks of all software. It's a unit that's so small by today's standards that it's almost meaningless. Almost. We talk about gigabytes (1 billion bytes), terabytes (1 trillion bytes), petabytes (1 quadrillion bytes), or even exabytes (1 quintillion bytes). It's still not the smallest unit - that honor goes to a bit - which is a unit that can have one of two values - 1 or 0. Those bits are then strung together in sequences of 8 to make a byte. Fun fact, that's why every kilobyte, megabyte, and up is divisible by 8.
So from a technology perspective, a byte is the first real unit of meaning. Any expression of ethics, morals, and values starts here. Plus, it's a cool-looking word. I'm not immune to a good-looking word. Plus, it was a homophone for "bite-sized," which I'm sure is no surprise, means easily consumable. So Byte-sized meant two things - both the technology-driven topic and the goal of being easily consumable for most people.
The ethics piece of that name.... well, that's pretty self-evident.
The Domain
When I went to register a new domain, I was torn between the default '.com' and what I thought was a clever usage of the '.io' domain. I thought .io was clever because it's like a bit - using the short-hand "i" for true and "o" for false. I realized though, when I had to explain to a good friend, who is also very nerdy, that might be a little niche even for my audience.
So I did the only logical thing - I bought both the .io and the .com. But the .com redirects to the .io. In the end, I couldn't deny my nerdy side and the stupid jokes that make me happy.
So that's it. That's how I came up with Byte-sized Ethics and the domain I chose. It's really a testament to my own humor and jokes that really I get. But it makes me happy, and makes me excited to write, so it all works out in the end :-)1
Here’s to the next 40 posts, and the next 500 subscribers.
Congrats! Well deserved.