About Alden Gillespy

I’m Alden Gillespy. I work across two disciplines that most people keep apart: software engineering and cinematic production. On one side I design, build, ship, and operate full-stack web applications; on the other I direct, shoot, and edit video and photography. They’re not a day job and a hobby — they’re one body of work.

The two sides share more than it first seems. Structure, timing, focus, hierarchy, pacing, and the way an audience actually experiences a thing matter as much in an interface as they do in a cut. Engineering gives my visual work repeatability and precision; filmmaking gives my software a sense of motion, atmosphere, and emotional clarity. I don’t treat design as decoration added after the code — architecture, interface, motion, language, and story are parts of the same product.

On the engineering side I’ve contributed to production software at real scale — including a consumer DNA-kit activation experience at Ancestry (React, Redux, Node, Kotlin) and a search-driven marketplace platform at Concepta (PHP, MySQL, Apache Solr) — alongside a growing portfolio of products I’ve built independently, end to end: architecture, frontend, backend, data model, cloud deployment, and the design system tying them together.

Those independent products include Memrey, a memory-centered system for organizing and rediscovering personal media with AI, kept honest by traceable evidence; and Andacity, a travel search-and-booking platform built on Qwik and TypeScript. Others are earlier — prototypes, investor demonstrators, and concepts still in build — and I try to say plainly which is which rather than dressing every idea up as a launched company.

Alongside the software, I produce cinematic video and photography under Shadowcat Pictures: music-driven visual storytelling, editing for rhythm and emotion, and large-scale fountain films built around light, motion, and sound. The same instinct runs through my media systems, too — like Radiant Radio: The BOLT, an internet radio station with its own programming strategy, brand identity, and broadcast chain.

What ties all of it together is a single problem I keep coming back to: taking something complicated — a system, an idea, a lifetime of photographs — and turning it into something clear, useful, and worth remembering. I’m interested in work and collaborators where that’s the goal, whether it’s an engineering role, an early-stage product, or a piece of visual work. (This bio is a working draft — verify the flagged details, then make it yours.)