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
Research Slop: Driving Google Workspace from the Terminal
Testing which CLI tools can read and write Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail programmatically. The GCP setup is bizarre, the results are real, and Claude did a bad job organizing it.
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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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