My name is Aaron Cupp. I have been on the internet for WAY too long…
I started my journey down the rabbit hole that is internet technology when I was about 11 years old. The internet was still GOPHER and ARCHIE access via BBS systems. I got lucky and had access to the local college internet via my mother, who was one of the SYSOPs at the college.
I am mostly self-taught when it comes to my computer education. I learned BASIC and COBOL on my own from books. Self taught linux from breaking systems I built in my bedroom. My first Linux OS was Slackware…floppy install. There was about 50 of them for the OS and X-windows :) I got into IRC and MUDs not long after getting online. Both of these got me more involved in programming and systems. I picked up LPC (a C-like language for game development) from MUD gaming. I picked up tcl from playing with eggdrop bots in IRC.
I got my official education from Modesto Junior College, earning an A.S. in Computer Science as well as a Computer Programming Certificate.
In my spare time while working for a K-12 in Northern California I was involved in running a number of IRC networks and internet radio stations. From 2007–2008 I developed the station for techno-dnb.com, and in 2009 I launched my own project and operated it until about 2014 as an online radio platform. I used these personal projects as a basis for my professional advancement and moved out of the public sector and into the private world of the Bay Area tech bubble.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the opportunity to start working on my personal projects again. I relaunched my Tech-Noid Systems project as a bass music collective — part soundsystem, part open-source workshop for the tools I always wished existed.
These days Tech-Noid Systems is where my music and engineering habits collide. On the music side we’ve invested in a QSC-based soundsystem and are putting together our first round of live events, with a podcast and the relaunch of the Tech-Noid radio feed both on the way. On the engineering side it’s become a home for open-source software aimed at broadcasters and streamers — like obs-radio-output, a native OBS Studio plugin that streams straight to an internet radio server (now in public beta).
Outside the collective, I’m always building tools for the work I actually do. Audiophore is the current one — a cross-platform bridge that drives lighting and visuals from live audio, which I’m putting to use in my own visuals and VJing.
On the professional side, the past several years took me into technology leadership — most recently as a Manager of Site Reliability Engineering, where I hired, onboarded, and mentored a geographically distributed team of five SREs alongside two offshore SRE/DevOps teams supporting a SaaS data analytics platform. Today I’m back closer to the systems themselves as a Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Feedonomics (part of Commerce) — 20+ years of Linux and infrastructure work behind me, and no sign of climbing back out of the rabbit hole.