I’m Brian Faust.

I’m a self-taught software engineer who has spent nearly two decades building products, consulting, and working as a CTO. Most of that work started after the easy answers had stopped working: the application had become fragile, traffic had exposed the wrong bottleneck, or a seemingly small feature touched half the system.

I care more about whether a decision fits the problem than whether it follows a fashionable pattern. Laravel can be the right answer. So can Go, Rust, Swift, or a boring SQL query. Familiarity is useful, but it stops being an advantage when the team spends more time fighting the stack than solving the problem.

That has taken me through APIs, databases, web and desktop applications, command-line tools, distributed systems, scraping, low-level programming, and blockchain. The useful part of moving between those areas is learning which ideas transfer and which ones only sounded universal inside one ecosystem.

I learn by building, measuring what actually happens, and explaining where my assumptions were wrong. This site is a record of that work: tools I use, systems I’m building, and technical arguments grounded in more than preference.