Hi.
There are a few Aaron Brady's out there — I am the one who wrote software and built infrastructure at Crestnorth, iWeb, Shopify and Internet Archive. (My LinkedIn, if you want).
(I'm not the musician but I'm also not the one who killed a garda)
I live in Ottawa, Ontario where I spend my days mostly tinkering with things and cycling (as weather permits).
Here are some write-ups of small projects that I found fun or interesting:
- Running STP over VXLAN over WireGuard (2017) — do not do this; clamp your MTU instead.
- Building and debugging a little Z80 breadboard computer (2016) — the fun is building it, not using it for anything.
- Measuring Frequency Response of an SSM2019 pre-amp (2016) — this isn't the best equipment or laboratory conditions but it produced results.
- Making a colour lookup table from a Polaroid (2021) — the results are bad but believably correct.
- Building a 1 mega-baud RS232 link (2024) — indulging in nostalgia for SLIP and serial ports.
I enjoy writing small software with few dependencies, especially if I'm interacting with hardware. Some examples that I like:
- A Swatch Internet Time clock with an I2C display (C, 2022) — I've been a fan of .beat since owning a Swatch that featured it back in high school.
- Driving a Nokia 5110 display over SPI on Linux (C, 2022) — I previously wrote a version of this driver for microcontrollers (Forth, 2016)
- A minimal SMTP server with Maildir delivery (C, 2024) — I used this for real for nearly a year.
- A WSPR implementation for Si5351 DDS (C, 2023) — during one of my radio phases (with Dan Minor)
This website was a blog on-and-off since 2002, with many of the posts still in GitHub but almost none of those pages are relevant any more. Blogging is the wrong format: I just want a website; not a chronological list of posts.
For several years I've written annual retrospectives. These are probably only interesting to future-me and to people who know me in person. 2024. 2023. 2022. 2021. 2020.
I love email (from humans) and I'm on Mastodon, on a server I run for townies. I still have a PGP key.
© 2002–2025 Aaron Brady
Usury is evil.