A short history of a small company

2013

I incorporated Tropibyte in September 2013, in Atlanta, and did the whole thing in a single afternoon: filed for the EIN, registered the domain, set up the email. The name is two jokes stacked on each other. “Tropi” is for Florida, where I grew up. “Byte” is for the unit that quietly runs everything in PC land, which is where I have spent my career.

Then I drew a palm tree whose trunk is a stack of the number 8, because a byte is eight bits. I made it in Corel Paint Shop Pro. It was not good.

2013

Now

I have kept the palm tree ever since. It is better drawn now. It is the same tree.

The quiet years

Tropibyte took contracts, delivered them, and went dormant when I took full-time work. That is the honest shape of most one-person companies, and I am not going to dress it up. It has always been one person: me. What changed over those years was not the size of the company but the depth of what I had shipped, across game consoles, endpoint security, embedded devices, and financial systems.

The turn

A few years ago the ground moved. Software development changed more in two years than it had in the previous ten, and most of what got written about it was either breathless or dismissive, with very little in between from people who actually maintain large native codebases.

Then, in 2023, family obligations meant I needed the kind of schedule flexibility only independent work provides. So I came back to what Tropibyte was for in the first place.

I started building the software I kept wishing existed: a Windows shell that did not require a runtime; endpoint security that could reason about what it was seeing without shipping your data anywhere; the tools I wanted to use myself. That work is still going.

Now

Tropibyte ships real products, runs real sites, and takes on consulting and development work in the thing I have done for more than 25 years: native Windows systems, in C, C++, and C#.

Still one person. Still the palm tree.