more about stollee

stollee is the nickname that Christopher Stoll picked up while serving in the Ohio Army National Guard. The Air National Guard secured the rights to use impressive callsigns, so the Army was left to take people's last names and simply add "-ie" to the end. For example, stollee's battle buddy in Iraq was Smitty, derived from the root "Smith." Always the mild subversive, stollee decided to use "-ee" rather than the customary "-ie" or "-y."

After being deployed to Iraq and serving on the front lines of Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), stollee used the GI Bill to purchase a BA in history and an MS in computer science. He originally wanted to follow his dreams in the arts and perhaps pursue a doctorate in history, but instead did the practical thing and went in to the more lucrative field of technology. The world is probably better off for this choice, as he has always been a better technician than a historian, and on many days, he is barely passable at that.

Being the sentimental type who would actually consider pursuing an advanced degree in something as useless as history, Stollee took his valuable computer science degree and squandered it by staying in the Midwest. As the pre-COVID-lockdown coastal elites knew, you could only produce valuable technology if you were under pressure from the effects of climate change.

So, stollee quietly toiled away in the Rust Belt. He built many things that would have been much more impressive if they had been done in Silicon Valley. He prototyped an embedded, mobile computer vision solution for a global oil producer. He used computer vision to build a remote inventory monitoring system for a major battery distributor. He developed a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) to help predict attendance for one of Orlando's major theme parks (just before the pandemic struck and invalidated historical norms). And he architected an end-to-end computer vision pipeline to automate data center inventories for a national cable provider.

Finding the pain-to-reward ratio of those endeavors not sufficiently high, stollee agreed to join a friend in forming a venture-funded tech startup in the B2B SaaS space. Knowing that timing is everything, they launched the business just as the Federal Reserve was preparing to raise interest rates and shut down the venture capital party.

It is clear that stollee's training in history prepared him to recognize good ideas once their time had passed. To that end, he also takes photographs using film and has constructed a darkroom in his basement to process the results. He is demonstrably bad at this activity too, but it keeps his mind off how bad he is at business and technology. Also, stollee recognizes that future generations will have no appreciation for his mediocrity; higher-quality AI-generated code will imminently replace his work. So, he seeks to preserve his historical ordinariness in the form of photographic negatives – assuming, of course, he manages to develop them properly.

Like every good wreck, stollee is surrounded by a mixture of rubberneckers and good Samaritans, and he is appreciative of them all.