About Me

Who is this tecnobrat person?

Who I am

Hi, I’m Brian Stolz, better known online as tecnobrat. I’m a Principal Engineer at Articulate, and I’m entirely self-taught.

Over 25 years I’ve worked across product, architecture, and platform engineering, often all at the same time. I’m polyglot by necessity (Ruby, TypeScript, Elixir, Python, and whatever the problem calls for) and happiest when I’m building, whether that’s the features people click on, the architecture underneath them, or the platforms other engineers stand on.

What I do

Product

Building the features and applications people actually touch, end to end and across the stack.

Architecture

Designing how systems fit together: clear boundaries, sensible trade-offs, and decisions that age well.

Platform

Building the systems, services, and infrastructure other engineers stand on, from tooling to deploys.

How I think

At my core I’m a problem solver. I love a good puzzle and figuring out why weird things happen, though I’ll be the first to admit I have a hard time putting one down until I understand it.

I learn by doing. Hand me something completely foreign and I’ll struggle with it for a few hours and walk away knowing it cold. I’m a hacker in the original sense of the word: I poke at things until they bend to my will.

I’m also a zebra and a spoonie. Living and working with chronic illness has taught me to respect pacing and sustainability, and it’s a big part of why I build systems that don’t depend on heroics to keep running.

Why I build this way

  • Boring reliability : The best systems are the ones nobody has to think about. Predictable beats clever.
  • Clear ownership : Someone is responsible, everyone knows who, and the path to fixing things is obvious.
  • Predictable failure : Things break. Good systems break in ways you understand and can recover from quickly.

Where tecnobrat came from

The nickname comes from my family. They used to call me the “technology brat,” which became “techno brat,” all from a place of love. I loved it, and it just stuck.

So why no h? I picked the name back around 1998, when I spent a lot of time on IRC. The network I was on only allowed nine characters, so I had to choose between something like technobra and tecnobrat, and the second was the clear winner. It had the bonus of being genuinely unique, and the rest is history.