About me

I’m Ethan. I do a number of different things across a number of different disciplines - some of them pretty well, some of them just for the fun of learning new things. This blog focuses on things that make me happy.

My undergraduate degree was in Music Technology at NYU, with a focus on digital signal processing and product design. I built a couple cool things there, including a harmonizer device with a custom pitch shifting algorithm that ran on an embedded device. For work, I do audio QA and editing for Splice, building some internal tools for them as well.

I’m starting a graduate program soon at UC Berkeley, studying cybersecurity. I’ll probably have more to write about that subject in the coming months.

Tech

I enjoy automation and optimization problems, especially when their solutions improve the lives of human users. I like to build tools that enhance workflow efficiency, such as my extensions for Ableton Live and Reason. I like to hack old hardware and give it new life, from recycling old PCs into homelab equipment to modifying old music gear to add modern features.

I try to keep a full tool belt of languages I’m familiar with, but I usually gravitate towards Python and Go when given a choice. Aside from those, I’ve worked extensively in C/C++, Lua, JS/TS and Shell scripts.

Music

I’ve been making music for a long time. My favorite (and the most recent) music that I’ve made is under the tarnisher alias, but the music I’m most known for is under the name soupandreas. The former is more indie pop/rock oriented, the latter is electronic music. I write, record, produce, mix and master everything myself. I’m not as focused on releasing songs right now, as I’m not really focusing on building a music career, but I don’t ever intend to stop making music. Mostly, I play piano and guitar in my free time.

Colophon

This site is generated from a set of Markdown files with a very simple static site generator I built in Go. It uses goldmark and goldmark-frontmatter for Markdown parsing, html/template for templating, and feeds for RSS generation. There’s no JavaScript on the site at all, and the only analytics are whatever Cloudflare can discern from the web traffic.

The page design is kept intentionally simple. I don’t think a site like this needs to be anything more than text on a page - there’s some CSS to make it pleasant to look at, but past that I feel like adding more features provides diminishing returns. Besides, if you’re reading this (and you’re not me) you’re likely generating anomalous levels of traffic to the site, so I’m not too concerned about it.