Our Organization Origin Story

By Julia

Bytes & Pieces: where music and coding meet

I remember watching an upright Kawai piano roll up my front steps. Before long, I sat down to play on this interesting-looking structure without skipping a day. I was just too intrigued by it.

First recital performance.

Eventually, playing the piano became so integrated within my life that I could be walking in a hotel room one day and then suddenly, the next second, end up playing the Bach Chromatic Fantasy on the hotel piano. Which was exactly what happened in Traverse City in the summer of 2021 right after my family and I had just gone jet skiing. I also started composing my own songs and pieces as well, inspired by both classical and pop styles.
Then, something completely different happened in my life. After some contemplating, I decided to sign up for a computer class in 8th grade where we learned web design and Scratch, where I found a new passion: coding.

First Python Game.

Coding was so fun for me that I stayed an hour or more after school every Monday in our computer science club in order to finish this text-based adventure game I made in 9th grade. I even set a reminder to bring a snack bar every Monday to potentially fuel some creative juices. Later, I started learning more languages, such as HTML, CSS, and Java, and created more websites, games, etc. The amount of creating one can do in both music and coding is absolutely astounding to me, and that’s the aspect that kept me intrigued in both hobbies.

Bytes & Pieces logo.

But I realized there was more to coding and music than just learning and creating.
I started Bytes and Pieces in order to share what I learned in two of my favorite passions. As both of these fields are highly understudied in schools, I decided to start an organization that hosts workshops, events, contests, and more to provide a deeper or extra curriculum that explores topics in both computer science and music composition. We also hope to help increase diversity and inclusion, as minorities are highly underrepresented in both of these fields, and bring our workshops to under-resourced areas and around the world.

For the first few months at the start, I planned out our workshop curriculum, advertised our organization to social media pages and other people, and recruited curriculum developers, workshop mentors, and a designer for our Instagram posts and flyers. Fast forward, as of October 2022, we have impacted over 420+ students.

We just had our first workshop on February 5th, on web development, HTML, and CSS. The routine for each workshop is to advertise, choose a workshop time, find a mentor, develop the curriculum, teach the curriculum, and send out the Google slides and recordings to everyone.

I strive to pour as much hard work and passion into Bytes and Pieces (the organization) as I do for Bytes and Pieces (coding and music).

With kindness,

Julia
Founder and President, Bytes & Pieces