I’m Brad Pillow. I started PillowSoft in 1996 as a one-person firm for innovative software development — image formats and video codecs, embedded systems, mobile apps, cloud platforms. Before that, a dessert café. The two are less unrelated than they sound: both are mostly about getting something out the door while it’s still good.
These days I’m mostly retired — which in practice means I get to pick the problems. Right now that’s AI technologies and building applications in Flutter.
Not taking new projects right now
I co-founded both companies and helped architect a number of their products — graphics hardware and the software that drove it. One side effect stuck around: I co-created the TARGA (.tga) image format, a deliberately small container for 24-bit images, written for boards that no longer exist. Decades later it is still sitting in your image editor’s Save As list.
Nine years on digital video: compression, codecs, color and the GPU — the unglamorous layer underneath the timeline, where a dropped frame is somebody’s ruined afternoon.
Cloud-first video surveillance and access control, from device integration up through the platform. Cameras are embedded systems with opinions; making thousands of them agree is the interesting part.
Hiring at the hourly end of the market, where the applicant is on a phone on a bus. Now PivotCX.
I bake, badly and often. I swing dance. I sing. I have been known to kayak, take photographs, argue about physics with nobody in particular, and read more science fiction than is strictly defensible. I co-founded a dessert café in the nineties — as the idea half of the partnership, not the one behind the counter.
Posts about the parts that were hard: architecture decisions I’d make again, a few I wouldn’t, and the odd note from thirty years of watching frameworks come and go.