Profile · Principal Engineer & Founder

Principal Engineer & Founder Faris Brni Turns Coffee Into Software

Hamburg remains unsurprised. The principal engineer, founder, fractional CTO and consultant has spent more than a decade turning ideas into production systems — for browsers, for pockets, and for the teams that run them. Our reporter spent a morning at his desk and came back with a rubber duck.

By our staff reporter (also Faris)
Filed from Hamburg · 53.5511° N

PICTURED: The rubber duck credited with fixing most of Mr. Brni’s bugs, photographed at his desk this morning. It declined to comment.Photo: WebGL / The Daily Commit↳ Hover to inspect the print · click to consult the duck

HAMBURG — Somewhere between the Elbe and a very long terminal session, Faris Brni is building things. As a principal engineer that means architecture, technical direction and production systems that stay boring at 3 a.m. For founders who need one, it means stepping in as a fractional CTO. He co-founded his first company in 2015 and has been shipping ever since.

He writes TypeScript the way other people write shopping lists, holds opinions about React that are firmer than he admits, and once fell far enough down the crypto rabbit hole to ship an app from the bottom of it. These days he collects AI tools the way other people collect vinyl — and wires the good ones into real products.

Asked for comment, he pointed at the rubber duck on his desk. The duck, pictured, declined. This newspaper is his personal page: no résumé, no trophy cabinet — just the work and the things he likes making. Arrived from one of his products, or need a senior engineer, a CTO or a second opinion? The Letters page goes straight to his inbox.

The Workshop

What he does for a living, and the obsessions that keep putting things on the bench.

Principal engineering

Systems that outlive their authors

Architecture, platform design and the unglamorous decisions that keep production boring. Sets the technical direction — and still writes the code.

Fractional CTO

Technical direction, on demand

Part-time CTO for startups and scale-ups: roadmaps, architecture, hiring and the hard calls, with full attention.

Founder

Knows what shipping costs

Co-founded his first company in 2015. Builds with an owner’s eye for what matters now and what can wait.

Consulting

Second opinions, first principles

Architecture reviews, technical due diligence and rescue missions for teams that need a senior pair of eyes.

TypeScript

Types all the way down

Believes a good type signature is a love letter to your future self. Will spend an hour making the compiler smile.

Web & mobile

Browsers and pockets

React on the web, React Native on iOS and Android — one team, one language, products that feel native everywhere.

Tool collector, agent builder

Tries every new AI tool so you don’t have to, keeps the good ones, and wires them into products that earn their keep.

Crypto

Came for the charts

…stayed for the distributed systems. Still thinks a block explorer is a perfectly good bedtime read.

Graphics

Pixels that misbehave

Halftones, dithering, three.js. This paper renders its own photos on your GPU, sixty times a second.

Also from this publisher

Products, apps & experiments

The catalogue is at the printers. Arrived here from one of Faris’ products? Then you already know one of them — tell him what you think on the Letters page.

The Wire

Headlines from the agencies on the beats the editor follows. Pulled from Google News, refreshed hourly.

Last pull 11:13 Hamburg time · 5 desks · 25 dispatches · via Google News

The Science Desk

Papers, preprints and long-form thinking. Peer review: pending. Coffee: consumed.

FIG. 1 — Neural noise at 400× magnification. Artist’s impression; the artist is a fragment shader running on your GPU.

Embargoed until further notice

The first paper is still in the press.

This desk will carry Faris’ papers, preprints and long-form notes — each with its own page, a citable abstract, and a feed for anyone who wants it first.

Working title: On the unreasonable effectiveness of rubber ducks. Abstract rewritten fourteen times so far.

Methods how papers are printed here

Format: Markdown in, newsprint out. Optional PDF, DOI and arXiv links.
Citable: Permanent URL per paper, abstract up front, a “cite as” line.
Discoverable: Google Scholar citation tags and ScholarlyArticle structured data.
Syndicated: RSS for humans, llms.txt for the machines that read on their behalf.

All papers →RSS feed llms.txt

Puzzles & Stars

A mini crossword for people who read error messages for fun, and a horoscope for people whose planets are dependencies.

The Mini

⏱ 00:00

across

1Idempotent HTTP verb
4Hero on a developer’s poster, perhaps
6Saturn’s largest moon — or a line of Nvidia GPUs
8Hot ___ (tech Twitter’s leading export)
9Block-scoped JavaScript declaration

down

1Linus Torvalds’ other famous project
2What you do to a file before :wq
3What SUM() returns
5Data ___ (where logs go to be forgotten)
7Microsoft framework, dot-prefixed

Stack-o-scope Friday, 6 November 2026

AriesYour lucky HTTP status is 418.
TaurusBeware of regular expressions bearing gifts.
GeminiA merge conflict brings two old friends together.
CancerThe bug is in the last place you look, because then you stop looking.
LeoCoffee: strongly aligned. Sleep: in opposition.
VirgoYour tests pass. Do not ask why.
LibraThe documentation was right all along.
ScorpioA cache you forgot about remembers you.
SagittariusA stranger will open a pull request. Be kind; it is you in six months.
CapricornYou will name a variable perfectly on the first try. Savor it.
AquariusAn old TODO comment finally gets its moment.
PiscesMercury is in retrograde, and so is your dependency tree.

Classifieds

Wanted, lost, found and missed. Rates: free. Accuracy: debatable.

Available

Fractional CTO, experienced

Principal engineer and founder, shipping since 2015. Architecture, teams, AI, due diligence. Serious enquiries via Letters to the Editor.

Wanted

Interesting problems

Will trade for working solutions. Weird ones preferred. Apply via Letters to the Editor.

Lost

One (1) semicolon

Answers to “;”. Last seen near line 42 of a JavaScript file in 2015. Sentimental value. Reward.

For sale

Domain names, never used

Assorted .io and .dev, lightly aged in optimism. Renewal fees included, dreams not.

Missed connection

You: a race condition

Me: couldn’t reproduce you. We met briefly in production on a Friday. Please write back.

Free

Framework advice

Which JavaScript framework to use. Advice changes weekly. First come, first served.

Seeking

Rubber duck, experienced

Must be a patient listener. Quacking optional. Current duck is overworked and has unionised.

Notice

Tabs vs. spaces

The annual debate is postponed indefinitely after both sides were found to be using Prettier.

Services

Printing, on demand

This newspaper prints itself on your GPU. Also available on paper: press ⌘/Ctrl + P.

Dear Faris

The questions readers ask most, answered by the editor himself.

Who is Faris Brni?

Faris Brni is a principal engineer and founder based in Hamburg, Germany, who also works as a fractional CTO and consultant. He co-founded his first company in 2015 and has been building and shipping web, mobile and AI products ever since, mostly with TypeScript, React and React Native.

Can I hire Faris as a fractional CTO or consultant?

Yes. He works with startups and established teams as a fractional CTO, on architecture and code reviews, technical due diligence, and as a hands-on principal engineer on the hard parts of a product. Write via the Letters to the Editor form or book a call.

What does Faris work on?

Web and mobile products end to end: system architecture, platform and API design, TypeScript/React front ends, React Native apps and AI-powered features — plus technical strategy and team building as a CTO. The Workshop section lists what is currently on the bench.

How do I contact Faris Brni?

Write a letter via the Letters to the Editor form on this page (it lands directly in his inbox), book a call, or message @FarisBrni on X. If you came from one of his products, mention which one.

Where is Faris based?

Hamburg, Germany — 53.55° N, 9.99° E, Central European Time.

Does Faris publish papers?

Papers, preprints and long-form notes are published in the Science Desk section of this site as they are finished, with an RSS feed for anyone who wants them first.

Why is this website a newspaper?

Because a résumé is a list of things that already happened, and a newspaper is about what is happening today. Also: halftone shaders.

Letters to the Editor

The only section of this newspaper you get to write.