Services
FrogNet is free to build on. When you need more, this is the help.
The developer license and the build manual get you a long way on your own. Past that — a commercial deployment, a custom UnREST handler, a hard network problem that has no Stack Overflow answer — Fawcett Innovations is the team that wrote the stack. A senior engineer who has shipped this class of system for fifty years, not a layer of account management over a junior bench.
Six places I'm worth the call.
Distributed systems & coordination
Shared state across unreliable links, host election and failover, self-forming topology, split-and-merge recovery. I'll design it so it stays correct under partition instead of pretending partition won't happen.
Networking & custom protocols
Wire formats and framing, overlays and tunneling, NAT traversal, semantic compression, routing and discovery. When off-the-shelf doesn't fit, I build the protocol and prove it under loss, latency, and jitter.
Real-time media & streaming
Adaptive audio/video that holds a call together on a degrading link and recovers on its own — the same ladder I've driven from HD down to a bare beacon over a 900 MHz radio backhaul and back, in production.
Embedded, edge & offline-first
Systems with no cloud and no center — running on Pi-class hardware, mini-PCs, and radios, designed so a lost uplink is normal weather rather than an outage.
Legacy rescue & modernization
I've shipped on a 1970s Harris mainframe and on this year's Linux kernel. I can read an old system honestly, find the real fault instead of the convenient one, and move it forward without betting the business on the migration.
Architecture review & due diligence
An independent read of a design, a codebase, or an acquisition target: what's load-bearing, what's a liability, what the demo is quietly hiding, and what it will cost to make it real.
Four ways to use me — pick the smallest that solves your problem.
I'd rather sell you the focused engagement that actually moves the needle than the biggest one. Most relationships start with a review and grow from there.
Architecture & risk review
days · fixed scope
I read the design or the code, run it against the hard cases, and hand you a plain-spoken assessment with the risks ranked and the decisions named. The cheapest way to find out if you have a problem.
Architecture & protocol design
weeks · defined deliverable
We scope a specific hard piece — a protocol, a coordination model, a media path, a migration plan — and I design it end to end, with the proof harness that shows it holds.
Hands-on implementation
project-based
I write the hard part myself and prove it on real hardware, then hand it over documented and tested so your team can carry it. Not a slide deck — running code with a gate that's green for a reason.
Fractional principal engineer
ongoing · part-time
A standing senior seat for a team that needs depth it can't hire full-time — design authority, code review, and the hard-call judgment that keeps a system from painting itself into a corner.
You should call me if…
- The problem is in the network, the protocol, or the coordination — not just the UI on top of it.
- You need one accountable senior owner, not a team to manage.
- "It works on the demo" isn't good enough; you need it to hold under failure.
- You're evaluating someone else's system and want an honest second read.
- You have a legacy system nobody left understands.
I'm probably the wrong call if…
- You want a large staffing bench or a body-shop arrangement.
- The work is a standard web/CRUD app a generalist can deliver faster and cheaper.
- The decision's already made and you need someone to rubber-stamp it.
- You need 24/7 production on-call as the core of the role.
If I'm not the right fit, I'll usually be able to point you at who is.
Get in touch
Start with a conversation, not a contract.
Tell me what's hard. I'll tell you straight whether it's something I can move, and what the smallest useful engagement would look like.