I am Brian Mars. I build software in Las Vegas, most of it about things people would rather not think about until they have to. That was not the plan. It is where twenty-five years of work ended up pointing.
The short version
I spent most of my career as an enterprise architect, the last stretch of it on global commerce platforms at Nike. Systems at that scale teach a particular discipline. You learn what actually fails, which is almost never the thing the design document worried about. You learn that the hard problems are rarely the technical ones, and that doing the technical work well is what buys you the standing to go near the rest.
So I learned how to build things that hold up. Then I left, because I wanted to point that at problems that matter to one person at a time rather than at a quarterly roadmap.
EGBT Technologies
I started EGBT in September 20251. It is a small studio, and everything it makes is the same subject approached from a different angle.
One Final Message is a digital legacy platform. You record what matters while you can, and it reaches the people you chose when you no longer can. Beacon, run by the Milkweed Foundation as a public benefit company, is the narrowest possible version of that idea, built for people working against a shortened timeline: one message, one person, held until it is needed. Spectrum Codex is a self-description language for autistic people, which sounds like an unrelated problem and is not. All three are about being understood by someone who is not in the room.
The studio is small enough that the stack is mine to answer for, end to end. Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects underneath, TypeScript on the web, Swift and Kotlin on the phones. A decision made on a Tuesday can ship on a Tuesday, and it is why there is nobody else to blame when it does not.
I write about the work as I go, here and on the product blogs. Most of it is the unglamorous middle: the model I got wrong the first time, the failure mode nobody warned me about, the thing that took four years because it should have.
Away from my desk
I live in Las Vegas. I listen to a great deal of music2, I take Halloween more seriously than most adults do. I keep more computers running than I strictly need. I like stage magic and design illusions. And when I have an idea, I tinker with things that blur the edge between tech and art.
And yes, I am autistic and here is my SpectrumCodex code - Ss+* Sl+ St+++ Sf++ Pn- M++ SE-- Cn--- Pr-- Sc-- Cv+ Ct+++ Cl+++ Cb-- SI++$ R++ EF- Sm+ B- Pt--- Sy+ Ob-- Sn+ AD++ PD+++ RS+ Dx:fl SM:ib CI:av Ag:10s
Brian Mars is the nom de guerre of Brian Majewski, in use since the ‘80s when he was breaking into warehouses and throwing parties. You can reach him at brian@brianmars.com for the blog stuff or brian@egbt.com for the day job.