Scisco wasn’t originally meant to mean anything profound.
At least, not in our family.
In Latin, scisco is a third-conjugation verb: scisco, sciscere, scivi, scitum — “to inquire,” “to seek to know.” In Roman legal and political language, it carried a second meaning as well: to vote for or enact a law — a decision reached through inquiry rather than before it.
The word also belongs to the same broader linguistic family as scientia — science. Dig deep enough into its ancestry and you eventually arrive at an ancient root meaning “to split” or “to separate.” That may sound odd until you consider what science actually does: it separates one explanation from another. It takes two blades to make a pair of scissors, and at least two competing ideas to do real inquiry.
That’s the official etymology (Thank you, Claude!).
Here’s the unofficial history.
Scisco.no was registered in 2018 by my father for my brother while he was studying communication technology and machine learning at NTNU. He wasn’t thinking about Roman grammar. He simply needed somewhere to learn how to build things properly: deploying servers, connecting APIs, building dashboards, breaking them, fixing them, and gradually figuring out how the internet works under the hood.
Scisco.no was that laboratory.
Then he graduated, found a full-time job, and — as often happens with student projects — the site quietly went to sleep. Not abandoned exactly, just… dormant. A paid-up domain pointing nowhere in particular; the digital equivalent of a gym membership nobody quite gets around to cancelling.
It stayed that way for four-five years.
Then I picked it up.
I was halfway through my own Indøk-studies at NTNU — computer science, artificial intelligence, enterprise architecture and innovation — and found myself needing exactly what my brother had needed years earlier: a place to build, experiment and occasionally break things. Scisco was already there, waiting.
So I experimented.
What began as a personal learning environment gradually became something more: a platform for experimenting with AI, software, automation, research and writing. Today it serves both as my professional website and as an ongoing engineering project — because the best way to understand a system is still to build one yourself.
Looking back, the name turned out to fit remarkably well.
For two engineering students, five years apart, the same domain became a place for asking questions, testing ideas, making mistakes and learning by doing. The technology changed. The curiosity didn’t.
My brother inquired his way through cloud infrastructure.
I’m still inquiring.
It turns out that Scisco was never really about Latin after all. It has always been about curiosity.