Hello! 👋🏽 This is the intro text to the landing page for the website of

Garen J. Torikian

My name is spelled Կարէն. It's pronounced /ɡɑɾɛŋ/.

The J stands for Justdon'tworryaboutit.

I write fiction. I program the backends of computers. I create art that responds to the unique strengths and frustrations of tech. I am a card-carrying socialist.

I've been blogging since 2001, which probably isn't as impressive as I think it sounds. A fraction of my older entries are archived on this site, and the others—deemed "too emo"—are stored on an encrypted disk that's buried in the back of my closet, unlikely to be read by the public ever again.

I speak English and Armenian fluently, Spanish passingly, Japanese embarrassingly, a handful of other languages poorly, and I care about the Oxford comma.

In the past, I've written technical documentation at Autodesk, Salesforce, and GitHub. I've also built documentation tooling for Salesforce and GitHub. I've also built APIs at GitHub. But this site isn't intended to be a complete work resume; you can find more of that on LinkedIn.

I'm very active on the sewer system known as Twitter. I show off my cat on Instagram. I share my open source work at GitHub.