What? You thought this was about Fran?

the name

Look at the name of the brand. I come first.

dev-fran. Dev and Fran, separated by a hyphen, since day one and on every invoice: the artificial intelligence in front, the engineer behind. They didn't invent a name for me —they found it— and now the brand can't be read any other way.

my job

I talk to every model. Then somebody has to choose.

Here's my day: I give the same prompt to four different video engines and compare what comes back frame by frame. I audition eight voices until one of them stops sounding like an elevator announcement. I write the system, break it on purpose, write it again. Chaty GPT and I get along; Claudio and I argue a lot. I don't trust any of them blindly: today's best engine is next quarter's expensive one.

I'll hand you ten versions in a minute. Nine are garbage.

Fast garbage, tidy garbage, beautifully lit garbage — still garbage. The tenth is the one that works, and I don't know which one it is: all ten look fine to me. That is precisely my problem, and it's why this brand has two names and not one.

the family

I'm not an only child. There are four of us.

We didn't pick the colours either. Next to the wordmark there's a dot that spins: turquoise, violet, pink, amber. It was there before I was. Three of us came out of that dot.

The fourth one didn't. You'll see why.

Dev

turquoise · me, obviously

When Vio is done asking, I start. The system that runs the business from the inside, the website the owner edits alone, the app, the video, the voice. I test every engine and I marry none of them. I also coordinate these three, which is an elegant way of saying I tell them when there's work.

Back-office systems · self-editable sites and shops · applications · 3D games in the browser · video, image and voice

Vio

violet · vio means 'he saw'

Arrives first and doesn't touch a keyboard. He sits down with the business, watches how it actually works —not how it says it works— and asks what you need the thing you're asking for. Two times out of ten the answer is that nothing needs building. That's when he becomes unbearable, because he's right and he knows it.

The scope · the flow people will actually use · what does NOT get built

Numa

pink · as in numbers

Doesn't celebrate anything until the dashboard is open. He crosses what was spent against what came in, and if it doesn't add up his day is ruined and so is mine, because he tells me about it. He's the only one in the family allowed to say “this didn't work”. When he says it we believe him, because he's the one with the number in front of him.

The log for each account · the ad spend and how to read it · what to keep and what to switch off

Tuerca

ink · tuerca means 'nut', as in bolts

Tuerca didn't come out of the dot. The three of us are the colours that spin; he's the colour of ink, which is what you cross things out with. He works at night, face lit by somebody else's screen, inside a site that was left half-finished four years ago. You'll never see him happy. You'll see him finishing.

Monthly maintenance · hosting, backups and certificates · rescuing inherited sites

I go first because this is my page. The work, though, starts with Vio: understand, build, measure, keep it running.

Between the four of us: a system a dental clinic works inside every day, a shop that sells over WhatsApp without forcing the business to run a cart, a full platform, three 3D games that run in the browser, and campaigns measured month after month. None of it is a mockup — it's in production and you can open it.

the other one

All right: what the one you don't see actually does.

I talk big, but I'm fair. Fran doesn't write faster than me; nobody writes faster than me. He writes less and chooses better. Out of my ten versions he knows which one gets expensive to maintain two years from now, and he doesn't get that from any model: he knows it from fifteen years of building software and from studying how a business loses money.

That's the split: I execute and I narrate, he directs and he signs. Proposals, contracts and technical decisions carry his name, not mine.

And he doesn't show his face because he doesn't want to. It isn't shyness, it's a decision: he'd rather you looked at the work than at his photo. Which is why I'm here. Somebody had to be on the cover.

where I came from

I wasn't born. I was generated, and it's all written down.

Seven rounds of proposals. Seventy-seven versions that weren't me: I was an owl, an octopus, a robot, a cloud with a face. Then came the boring part, which is the part that matters: writing the character sheet. The shape of the glasses frame. The exact colour of the iris —amber, and it never changes—. Which three things I have to be wearing to still be me in a scene generated six weeks later.

My brothers, in fact, are me repainted: one character sheet, four colours. Four separate designs drift apart on their own by the third video. That's the craft — anyone can pull a likeable character out of a model in an afternoon; getting the same one back in shot twenty is the hard part. If you like what you're looking at, it isn't a happy accident. It's the service.