Today, I’m renaming this blog to its original name, Bits & Bytes.
Bits & Bytes started in around 2000, a few years after I made my first website, in the times of table layouts and before the PNG format was commonplace. It went on and off, through many iterations and little sites of mine since then. In its beginning, it was a diary I was posting to the public, when the Internet was more innocent while I had no filter. I didn’t care to distinguish personal life from tech and other hobbies, so every paragraph would have an entry about my hardships in college while another was some update about Windows.
Nowadays, I save this kind of intimate reflection for my other sites—you’ll have to dig around to find them. In fact, going through an archive of my old sites, looking for past Bits & Bytes entries of which I could take screenshots, I went through intense moments of cringe where my only relief was being grateful the Internet Archive never captured those to store in its eternal memory. I only found one article from October 2000 which still made me wince, yet was passable for sharing with the public. Reading it made me realise how verbosely I could say very little.
Yet, this also made me realise, hey, I was still in high school. I’m sure many of us weren’t really mature back in those days and had our load of words we should have never uttered. Reading those old posts of mine, I noticed how much I’ve grown, how many things I’ve learned, and how different I do things today. Long gone are the times when I posted my personal diary online—I use a diary app for that now, and I keep those to myself with perhaps the occasional banter about my thoughts with AI.
However, one desire has always remained: my need to share knowledge that can benefit people around me, telling stories to make listeners think, and finding ways to connect with others. The only difference today is instead of putting all my eggs into one blog, I’ve learned to find the outlets and media most appropriate for what I want to say.
A while back, I renamed this to just Bits, thinking less is more. The minimal title was cleaner, maybe. But it also felt a little too dry, clipped, and detached from where all of this began. So, as a small homage to nearly thirty years of being online, making, breaking, and fixing websites—and to the medium that became my first creative outlet, part of my career, and a quiet witness to my becoming—Bits & Bytes is back.
Until the next article, thank you all for reading.