Hello, World

Hey everyone, it’s Braden.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I wanted to share a little bit about how I got here and what I’m building.

This is inspired by my GitHub profile, which you can find here.

I started as a humanities student at Yale studying Ethics, Politics, and Economics, but I fell in love with coding in my first year. Since then, I’ve wanted to bridge the gap between software and the humanities by building and writing in public.

I’ve been really lucky to have some awesome jobs, but open-source software has always had a special place in my heart. It’s liberating to build things I love and share them openly without temptation for profit or monetizing off users.

While I make much less working on open source than I did in industry, I am fortunate to make it my full-time career.

Now I run Epicenter, an open-source software startup. I was fortunate to go through YC’s S25 batch and raise a fundraising round, so I can keep building without worrying about rent.

I’m building Epicenter around a principle: you should always be able to take your data with you. Your notes, recordings, documents, conversations, and history can stay together on your devices, and you can carry the whole thing away as one portable file that you control.

I’m skeptical of building a digital life around platforms you cannot leave. Your data should work with whatever app you choose. Apps should be replaceable, but your digital life should not be.

That principle also changes how I want to write. I’ve captured a lot of ideas over the past few years, but most of them have stayed scattered or private. Epicenter is a broader project, but part of what I want it to do is help me organize those ideas and develop them into something worth sharing. The Ark is my attempt to give them a public home that feels quieter than a feed: low-dopamine, deliberate, and still like me.

So this is my hello world. I will be posting more soon!