Hi, I'm Aaron.

I'm an Irish 🇮🇪 software developer and serial hobbyist living in Ottawa, Canada 🇨🇦.

I most recently worked as a Production Engineer at Shopify 🛒 — I was there through the transition from ~1,000 people and some datacentres to 10,000+ people and a lot of Google Cloud.

I was on Twitter 🐦 as @insom from 2007–2022. It took me far too long to leave for good.

I am the admin of a Mastodon 🦣 instance which is an off-shoot of the tilde.town intentional digital community 🏘️. You could always follow me at insom@tiny.tilde.website, if you'd like. It runs out of my basement. The cloud is for dupes.

I contribute sporadically to software on GitHub, upload photos to Flickr and reject recruiter spam on LinkedIn.

I've hosted a technical blog at this domain, on-and-off, since 2004. It seemed to be the thing to do, but I've recently found I don't enjoy it and it makes me feel guilty.

I think that back then blogging felt like a cool thing to do while we built out the user-created web, but honestly the world has gone a different way and 90% of what I've written has no value to anyone but me any longer. Technology and politics seem to age faster than anything else.

I've decided that I do like keeping a journal, where I sometimes talk about technical things. That's not the same thing, at all. I am unashamedly personal there, and primarily am writing for me.

You can find it on Gemini ♊ and Gopher 🦫 or read the latest post via Finger 👈 or even on the web 🕸️.

A few things I've written on my blog that I still think are interesting:

• The build log for the tiny Z80 microcomputer I built (2016).
• Running Spanning Tree Protocol over VXLANs over WireGuard to make a private Internet (2017).
• Using a Polaroid photo to make and apply a Colour Look-Up Table (2021).
• How I host Mastodon from my basement. (Why I host from my basement, too)

Thanks,