About Torsten Brass
I have built houses with my hands, driven transport trucks across two countries, worn a uniform, advised people on their money, and stood in front of a television camera. Not in that order, and not because I planned any of it.
Starting with my hands
I trained as a carpenter. That is where I learned the thing I still work by: measure carefully, build it properly, and don’t hide sloppy work behind paint. It turns out that applies to sentences and software too.
The uniform
Later I became a soldier, and I am a veteran now. That part of my life taught me what people are capable of when things are hard, and it left me with a low tolerance for anyone who wastes another person’s trust.
The army is also where the road first found me. I earned my licence in uniform and drove trucks in support, and I spent my last stretch at an infantry training school, where privates were trained up through the ranks. I was the driver who got them where they needed to be — out to the training areas, the ranges, the places they were sent to learn their history from. I did not think of it as a career at the time. It turned out to be the trade that carried me through the rest of my life, on another continent.
1992 — Shilo
In 1992 I was deployed to Shilo, Canada. That is where it happened: I fell in love with this country — the scale of it, the sky, the people.
Then I went home to Germany and carried it with me through everything that came next: the finance certification, the years in insurance and banking, the television work, the sales territory full of trucking firms. It never quite let go of me.
Some decisions take a long time to ripen.
Numbers instead of timber
In Germany I earned my certification in finance and moved into an entirely different world — investment, insurance, and work as a bank advisor in the insurance business. For years my job was to sit across from ordinary people at the moments that actually matter: buying a home, protecting a family, planning for an age they could not yet imagine. You learn quickly that most people are not afraid of numbers. They are afraid of being taken advantage of by someone who understands the numbers better than they do.
I have not forgotten that. It is the reason I care so much about what companies quietly do with people’s data today.
In front of the camera
Then television found me. Infomercials first, and later acting. I learned how a message gets built, how attention is won, and how easily an audience can be persuaded of something. That is a useful education for a writer, and an uncomfortable one for anyone paying attention to the modern internet.
The last job in Germany
My final position before we left was sales manager for a German health insurance company, and my territory was the transport industry. I spent my days with the HR departments of the trucking firms in my area, sitting across from the people responsible for the health and the cover of entire fleets of drivers.
I was never a stranger in those meetings. I had driven trucks myself, so when the talk turned to hours, strain and what the road does to a body, I was not reading it off a page. And a few years later I would be back behind the wheel full time, in a new country and a new language, on the other side of my own conversations. I know that industry from the desk and from the driver’s seat, and I am glad I got to see it from both.
That was the last thing I did in Germany.
2009 — leaving everything behind
Seventeen years after Shilo, my wife and I made the biggest decision of our lives: in 2009 we moved to Canada. We left everything behind — the careers, the network, the language we dreamed in, the whole comfortable shape of a life already built — and started again from nothing.
People sometimes call that brave. At the time it mostly felt like standing at the edge of something with no idea how deep the water was. I would do it again tomorrow.
The road, and the milk run
In Canada I went back to the road, driving trucks through the United States and Canada. Long hauls, long nights, a lot of country through a windshield.
For a stretch I also worked in security here, including time as a guard for the Canadian Armed Forces, with my veteran status recognized in the country that had taken us in. A German soldier standing watch for Canadian ones — I have always liked the symmetry of that.
These days my route is smaller and I like it far better: I collect milk from the farms around my city. Early mornings, gravel roads I know by heart, farmers I know by name, and real work with a rhythm to it. I will say it plainly, because not everyone gets to — I really like my job.
Adam – The Mobile Man
The writing grew out of all of it. My novel, Adam – The Mobile Man: A Journey from Flesh to Light, asks what becomes of a person as the digital world expands until it contains everything. It is a story about identity, freedom, and what connection actually costs us.
I think a carpenter, a soldier, a financial advisor, an actor and a truck driver were all necessary before I could write it.
And then the apps
The apps started as a hobby and quietly turned into something more.
DataGuard – Privacy Watchdog shows people which apps are tracking them and who is buying what those apps collect. It is the practical version of the question my novel asks: how do we stay human in a world that harvests us by default?
Lovecall is in the pipeline. And I am building an app for school bus companies — because a good idea does not care whether it sounds glamorous.
Why all of this sits on one page
I have started over more times than most people would consider sensible: new trades, new industries, new countries, new languages, and now a new craft later in life. The thread running through every one of them is the same. I want to understand how a thing really works, build it honestly, and be straight with the people on the other side of it.
That is what I try to do in fiction, and in software.