A picture of Aaron Aiken, smiling directly at the camera, on a bench with his family enjoying beverages from Starbucks.

Aaron Aiken

Harrisburg, PA

A guy in Harrisburg who builds his own tools, makes things by hand, and writes. A few years back my life came apart and I buried myself under six figures of debt; in 2024 God broke in — with a sledgehammer, not a whisper — and started putting me back together. My focuses now are dead simple, and I love it that way — God, family, others. I wrote a book about climbing out, called Splinched. Matthew 11:28-30.

I make things. Software for a living — business solutions and small applications, the kind that quietly hold a company together. Leather goods by hand, because some things should be cut and stitched and last thirty years. And lately, words: a book, this site, the occasional dispatch into the dark.

That’s the throughline, if there is one. Give me a problem and my instinct isn’t to find the right app for it — it’s to build the thing myself, learn how it actually works, and end up with something that fits my hand exactly. It’s a slower way to live. I’ve made my peace with that.

For a long stretch I was making a mess instead. In 2021 my life came apart, and by 2025 I’d buried myself under $110,000 of debt and a lot of trying to fill an empty place with money I didn’t have. In October 2024 God broke through — with a sledgehammer, not a whisper — and started putting me back together. My wife and I remarried in December 2025. The debt is most of the way gone. I wrote a book, Splinched, about how that happened and the system I built to climb out.

These days my focuses are dead simple: God, family, others. I tend a small private operating system that runs my life — payday sessions, project decks, a daily kneeboard, a ledger that hunts down forgotten charges — most of it stitched together in code I wrote for an audience of one. Some of it leaks out into the workshop, where I keep the tools and experiments worth sharing.

I also write The Long Way — a letter, roughly every two weeks, about the harder and slower and more honest path through debt, marriage, faith, and fatherhood. It is not optimization. It is not tips. It’s just the correspondence of a guy still walking it.

If you want the longer version, it’s still being written. For now: I’m a guy in Harrisburg who builds his own tools, makes things with his hands, and is grateful to be doing it with the lights finally on.

// Writing