I am Aaron Trickey, husband, father, and independent software developer, based outside of Chicago. “Casual Programmer” is the name of my (infrequent) blog and my software development company. My wife Hemi is my partner in app development, as she is in all things, and blogs more than me these days.
Main project
TimeStory is a powerful, fast, native Mac app
built to let you easily create beautiful, professional timeline documents.
Learn more or get a free trial at https://timestory.app, or buy it on the Mac App Store.
TimeStory is our main product and project, and has been my focus since 2019. You’ll find some other active, semi-active, or retired projects on the project archive page.
Tech background
Since 2019, I’ve been a full-time indie Apple developer. (I’ve been coding for iOS almost since the iOS 2.0 SDK came out, but for most of that time it was only on hobby side projects or small projects at work.)
Prior to that, I led and mostly built the software at a small telecom hardware startup, worked for many years as a developer or manager in a midsized telecom company, and consulted or did project work for clients from trading companies to manufacturing companies. I’ve written, designed, or led a lot of code in my life, targeting everything from 8-bit embedded controllers to distributed network management systems for very large networks.
“Casual Programmer”?
Back in the beginning, though, I was a kid with a Commodore 64, in a world full of computers of every shape and color, most of which would say “ready” when you turned them on. Home computing in those days encouraged programming just for fun; they weren’t just appliances loaded with other people’s opaque software. I’ve always wanted to help keep that alive; it’s why I released PixelNote, and something I originally thought I’d focus on when I quit my corporate job in 2014. At that time, I settled on the term “casual programmer”, an analogy to the more common term “casual gamer”. It’s the idea that you can just code because you want to, without ever releasing anything, making it a career, or using the shiniest tools. I ended up focusing on other things, and now that Hemi and I work together on TimeStory, we may change the company name some time, but that’s for later.
Contact
I don’t post much on social media. I can be reached in a few different ways:
- email: aaron@casualprogrammer.com
- mastodon: @at@universeodon.com
- micro.blog: @at
If you’re more interested in my resume, here I am on LinkedIn.
This site
I build this site using plain Jekyll. Authoring of Markdown, HTML, and CSS is done using Vim or Nova, depending on how big of an update and what mood I’m in.
I value the ability to view source on the Web, and try to keep my CSS and HTML somewhat readable. I do not use or participate in any user analytics or tracking.
The primary font used here is Charter by Matthew Carter, as converted to webfonts by Matthew Butterick, and generously licensed for free.