Senior engineering for teams that can't wait to hire.
I'm Frank Shotwell. I join startup teams as a fractional engineer and ship production code, 15 to 50 hours a month. For larger projects, I bring in senior engineers from a curated bench of people I've worked with over 20+ years across infrastructure, media, and security. When teams want guidance on AI-native development practices, I do that too. But mostly I ship code.
Projects
Hackathoner: A Claude Code Plugin for Hackathon Sprints
A meta-plugin that reads a hackathon's rules page and generates a complete project repo with custom skills, slash commands, and an SDLC workflow tuned for 24-hour timelines.
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Metaphorex: A Bot-Sourced Knowledge Graph
An agent-operated knowledge graph of metaphors. Five AI agents extract, refine, and publish structured content from books and papers, with humans directing editorial decisions.
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AI Startup: Incident Response to SOC 2
Led a security incident investigation, then stayed on to audit and remediate cloud infrastructure and support a SOC 2 renewal.
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Security Startup: From Pentest Triage Tool to Enterprise Platform
Solo-built cloud scanning, attack surface discovery, and LLM-powered triage on top of a pentest management prototype. Turned a 1-person engagement into a 3-person engineering team.
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Writing
Feeling the FONC (Fear of Neglecting Claude)
My Claude Max plan is a stream and I'm building a content mill
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Now It's Easier to Fix the Problem Than Talk Yourself Out of Caring
I have a new mental prosthesis that keeps pushing me to say 'yes and' instead of agonizing over 'why not'.
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