My name is Alfonso. But if you've worked with me, you probably know me as Victor Stein — and there's a real story behind that.
I was eighteen, maybe nineteen, taking technical support calls out of Nicaragua — English and Spanish, back to back, close to a hundred a day. On a floor like that you need a name for your calls: something that reads as Latino but lands cleanly for an English speaker, no spelling, no friction. My real name has a little friction, and on a three-minute call that friction is expensive.
On break and between calls I read, and the book I kept coming back to was Frankenstein. Everyone remembers the monster; the man who builds it is Victor Frankenstein — the creator. I took his first name and pulled the -stein off his last. Victor Stein: the creator, not the monster — a weirdly accurate name for someone who'd just figured out he liked building things.
“I wrote my first program on a call-center floor, in Notepad, to solve a problem that was costing me money. I've been doing a version of that ever since.”
How I work
The engineering is the obvious half — TypeScript deep, NestJS + GraphQL backends, React and React Native frontends, and the terminal tools and infra-as-code in between. The half people actually remember is the other one: I can sit with a non-technical stakeholder, understand the business problem, and translate it into something that ships — without making anyone feel small. I scope honestly, write things down, and treat a roadmap like my own repo. If I can't git blame it, I'll get around to it.
So whether you found me through a blog post, a GitHub repo, or a referral: the engineer and the guy who's easy to talk to are the same person. That's the whole point of the name.
Off the clock
I'm in Nicaragua. I tinker with my homelab, codify everything I own in OpenTofu, build split mechanical keyboards (a ZMK Corne is my daily driver), and live inside Neovim, WezTerm and tmux. I help run the local JavaScript community. And yes — the README on my GitHub profile is generated by infrastructure-as-code, because of course it is.