On having a handle
brian404 is a person I made. Brian Crumrine is the one I am. They serve different purposes and that's fine.
I’ve been brian404 for a while. The “404” started as a joke about being not-found, the kind of name a developer picks at 2am because it scans cleanly and the dot-com is gone forever. It stuck. brian404 GitHub, brian404.com portfolio, a music project as brian200, an alter-ego as Snacks Not Found. Each one is a face I put on for a specific room.
The handle is performative in a way the real name isn’t. brian404.com is dark, terminal-green, has a ticker tape that says SYSTEM ONLINE. It’s a posture. It says, in a loud font, that I’m the kind of person who’s comfortable in a terminal. That’s true, but it’s also a costume. I don’t open my terminal in the morning thinking BOOT SEQUENCE. I open it thinking what’s broken today.
Brian Crumrine is the person whose taxes get filed, whose name shows up on LLC paperwork for Empro, whose family asks how the day went. The handle is for rooms where the performance is part of the value (a music project, a dev community, a job interview at a startup that cares whether you can write the cool tweet). The real name is for rooms where the performance gets in the way.
The mistake a lot of people make with handles is treating them as either/or. Either you’re the buttoned-up real name everywhere, or you’re the persona everywhere. Both choices flatten something useful. The persona is more interesting in some contexts. The real name is more credible in others. The cost of maintaining both is small if you don’t try to make them say the same thing.
crumrine.net is the real-name page. It’s calm because it doesn’t need to perform. It lists the projects I’ve built and the businesses I run and points outward to the persona sites for people who want that flavor. It’s the page I’d be comfortable sending to a recruiter, to a family friend, to my dad. It says “this is the work” without saying “this is the brand.”
brian404.com stays as it is. Terminal. Loud. Personal in a different way. The two don’t need to merge.
If you found this page because you were looking for me by name, welcome. The work is on /work. The other versions of me are on the homepage.