About

About me

My name is Bradan Fleming (/’bɹeɪ dən ‘flɛm ɪŋ/).

I’m a 22-year-old computer programmer from Cultus Lake, British Columbia, Canada.

A cropped picture of me hanging from monkey bars with one arm

Various facts

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia, I’ve been programming since I was 6 years old (2010), and I’ve written software professionally.

I grew up homeschooled, completed high school online through HCOS, and I still use Zim and Anki to continue learning and maintain the knowledge I’ve built. (I don’t review everything I’ve ever studied — just a narrow range of subjects I care about.) I’m a fan of Adler and (most of) Wozniak‘s writings on learning.

I am an amateur violinist, and I was trained in the Suzuki method as a kid. These days, I only practice a few times per month rather than daily. I can also play the piano and guitar poorly.

I like making music, but I don’t release any of it. The programs I use are Renoise, Reaper, and MuseScore Studio. I also maintain a few audio plugins.

I study French for fun every day, and I can understand 80% of most movies and books and 90% of most YouTube videos. Philosophy books are still difficult for me. I don’t consider myself to “know” the language because I can’t speak or write proficiently, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever practice it.

I like radio, and I hold certificates for both amateur radio and marine radio. However, I rarely ever transmit because I still find it intimidating, and most of my interest is in the theory. Cheers to the Richmond Amateur Radio Club and John Semenec (VE7JWS) for getting me into it.

I like to model objects in Plasticity and 3D print them on my precariously-modded Ender 3 Max Neo running Klipper.

I occasionally collect, study, and repair vintage telephones. It’s a nice intersection of electronics, 3D modelling, and VoIP. Rotary dials scare me because they often have a bunch of annoying parts and old springs that break easily. (I’m looking at you GPO.)

My Linux distributions of choice are Fedora (for my systems) and Gentoo (for my development environments). I exclusively ran eccentric Gentoo systems for many years, but I was eventually wooed by Fedora’s relative ease of use as the modern desktop ecosystem improved. I also maintain the MakeMKV packages in RPM Fusion.

I’m not as politically active as I should be, but I value accessibility, public transit, equality, privacy, health care, infrastructure, education, climate change, diversity, firearm rights, trans rights, and the right to repair. Writings about the opinions I have can be found here.

Here is a history of the text editors I’ve used over the years: Notepad (2010), TextWrangler (2012), Notepad++ (2014), Atom (2016), Notepad++ (2018), Geany (2020), Sublime Text (2025).

Topics I like

Note that I am not necessarily proficient with all of the topics listed below. I do, however, find them interesting enough to have learned a bit about them.

Keys

Contact

Please contact me via email at bradan@cogspin.com or via Matrix at @bradan:bradan.ca. I like receiving emails, so you have my explicit permission to contact me about pretty much anything as long as you’re not marketing something to me.

All other methods of communication are unreliable. If you try to contact me via iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook, Signal, etc., I might not notice for a long time unless you let me know via one of the listed methods.

I often only check my messages once per day, so it’s generally best to send long-form messages or suggest a time to chat synchronously. This might be inconvenient, but it’s much easier for me to stay on top of.