I knew I would want it for something someday

LiveBytes started as a blog about going back to school.

I had enrolled in the IT degree program at Western Governors University when WGU was still a fairly small and new idea of a school. Fully online degree programs were unusual enough that the format itself felt worth writing about, especially since I had previous experience with traditional colleges for comparison.

So I registered LiveBytes.net and started keeping track of the experience.

The name amused me. It had the juxtaposition I wanted: life and computers, existing together in one slightly quirky phrase. It sounded technical without sounding like a corporate technology publication, which was good because I was not a corporate technology publication. I was one person going to school, learning things, comparing notes with my earlier experiences, and writing about whatever seemed interesting along the way.

It was fun. It was definitely a me thing.

Then school ended, and eventually the writing mostly did too. I drifted away from the site. There was no dramatic breakup and no final post announcing that I was moving on to the next exciting chapter. I simply stopped returning often enough for it to remain an active part of my life.

But I kept the domain.

Domains are not particularly sentimental objects. They are annual charges attached to names that you may or may not still be using. It would have been perfectly reasonable to let this one expire.

I couldn’t do it.

I knew I would want it for something, someday.

I did not know what the something was. For a long time, apparently, neither did LiveBytes. The name sat there while I accumulated more experience, more interests, more projects, and more versions of what I thought I might do next.

Recently, I started building my own tools and writing more seriously about learning, using, and working with AI. I wanted a place to talk about the products, but I also wanted somewhere for the thinking around them to live. A conventional portfolio did not feel large enough. Neither did a product site, a technical blog, or a carefully polished professional identity designed to suggest that I have only ever had one coherent interest at a time.

I needed a studio.

When I came back to LiveBytes with that in mind, it felt a little like recognizing the corners of an old familiar place after it had been remodeled. The proportions were still right. The light came through the same windows. I could tell where I was.

But more things fit now.

The remodeling wasn’t an insult to the old place. It did not require me to pretend the original blog had been an embarrassing early attempt that Serious Professional Trish had finally outgrown. That blog belonged here. It was simply the first room I had used.

Now there was a purpose for more of the building.

There is a software studio where Synesis, thePlan, and the other tools can be built, broken, reconsidered, and occasionally persuaded to stop displaying a spinner for data they already possess. There is a writing studio for these Notes and for a book that keeps borrowing from them when nobody is looking. There is a rehearsal room for music and theater. There is something between a classroom and a study for all the things I decide to learn because they are interesting and therefore I must know more about them immediately.

There is also a common room, because not everything needs to become a project before it is allowed through the door.

My mom used to say I should have become a professor or a scholar because I was her “professional student.” She was not wrong about the student part. I am still inclined to learn something new because I want to, not because it advances a plan or earns a credential. New technology qualifies. So do new science, new books, a good story, travel, history, and the endlessly surprising business of knowing other people.

I like toys. I am not young in years, but I remain entirely capable of becoming a kid when the toy is a new piece of technology, an unfamiliar idea, a beautiful bit of science, or a story I have not heard before.

All of that belongs in LiveBytes because all of it belongs in me.

Being a musician and part of a theater community is not the opposite of being a technology leader. Those parts feed each other. Leading people, shaping processes, studying a score, tracing an ugly synchronization problem, and trying to understand why a scene does not land may use different vocabularies, but they are not performed by unrelated personas who politely exchange the calendar at the end of the day.

A resume has reasons to separate them. A conventional portfolio probably would too. LiveBytes does not.

That does not mean every interest must be forced into a lesson about every other interest. Sometimes a theater story is about theater. Sometimes I am fixing IMAP because IMAP is rude, not because it is secretly a metaphor for a rehearsal schedule. The rooms can be distinct without pretending they are in different buildings.

In some ways, LiveBytes is multiple studios inside one friendly, happy place. Work moves between them when the connection is real. A thought from a Note becomes part of the book. Something I learn while directing music changes how I think about technical leadership. A software failure becomes a story about evidence, but only after it has finished being an irritating software failure.

I thought I kept the domain because I would eventually find the right thing to put there. I had that slightly wrong. I kept it until I understood that there did not have to be only one thing.

The musician, the theater nerd, the manager, the technologist, the writer, the wife, the sibling, the professional student, and the person delighted by a new toy are not competing for ownership of the site. They all spring from the same well: curiosity, creativity, and a fascination with both history and the bleeding edge of things.

The old corners are still recognizable. We simply use more of the rooms now.

~ Trish