Greetings Fellow Hacker!

Frosty here, aka Kevin Frost, aka @biztos.

I’m back on the job market, looking for an ambitious team to join for my next great adventure. Let’s use our software mojo to change the world, for good or for awesome!

In a hurry? TL;DR:

Profile

I am a builder.

I solve complex real-world problems with software. I mentor and motivate other people to do the same. I care deeply about the customer and the product, and also about the code itself. I push for things to always be their best possible thing-selves in a world where perfect is often the enemy of shipping.

I’m fairly higher-energy, and a good communicator among humans and robots alike. I am client-facing when I need to be, but also very much at home with the nerds.

Usually, I work in close cooperation with senior management as well as my fellow engineers. Usually, in some version of “remote” and with a team that bridges space and time -- or at least time zones.

I’m looking for a dynamic, smart team to join and amplify: together we can solve hard problems and make the world a better place, for both fun and profit.

What Have I Done?!

2021-present: Founder, TONSAI LLC.

I started my own company, and have been doing some consulting, some contract dev work, and some pre-seed startup prototyping.

The most interesting parts have been work on Applied AI, such as my framework for Agentic AI in Go; and also some crazy AI datacenter work, which exposed me to the sheer madness of Modern Ops World. Talk about opportunity!

Now it’s time to come in from the cold and work on bigger, longer-arc things.

Tech: Golang, Python, Postgres, MySQL, Swift, JavaScript, Docker, Grafana et al, OpenAI, sysadmin/devops misc.

2006-2021: Anti-Spam Engineering at Broadcom (formerly Symantec)

When Symantec was the undisputed leader in e-mail security, I joined to help them build out the back-office part of that product line. I arrived as a Principal Software Engineer and left as a Technical Director, which is more or less analogous to Software Architect.

This was an international team effort, and I had the privilege to work with some great engineers and product people in six different countries, sometimes even in person. It also enabled me to live in Europe for over ten years, working out of the German office. (Sprechen Sie Deutsch?)

The software we built was the very definition of mission-critical, and we had the great experience (no, really!) of working against an active and motivated adversary. That taught me to have a Security Mindset, which I hope will be useful when Skynet gets here, Mr Connor.

The original stack was Perl and Oracle, with internal web apps in a state of pre-MVC ooze and a lot of C to handle from the product side. I was brought in to modernize those web apps, but over time I ended up being the technical owner of most of the back-end, and helped lead its journey cloudward. By then I was moving pieces of it all to Python and Go, and aiming high for cloud-based efficiencies. If you interview me and want to hear some fun rants, ask about Lift & Shift.

Tech: Perl, Oracle, JavaScript, Golang, Python, Postgres, MySQL, Swift, JavaScript, Docker, AWS, GCP, and lots I forget right now.

1998-2006: Various Startups

I worked at a bunch of startups! Same as you, right? Maybe you’re doing it right now.

The most glorious of them was called MJuice, where I worked with an amazingly talented team I have longed to reunite ever since. Our business model was the same as iTunes! We coulda been contenders! We were one of the top online music providers — until the Napster Hysteria burned everything to the ground. I made a microsite for Mobb Deep! (OK, mostly I was hacking Perl and Oracle, but still.)

Other fun things were an anti-spam startup (totally failed, but led me to Symantec) and a Yelp competitor (smothered beneath noncommittal founders).

In my startup days I was a wearer of pretty much every hat except finance, which was surely for the best. I have the can-do attitude that fits the best of startups.

Tech: Perl, Oracle, JavaScript, SQL Server

1993-1997: Pharmacovigilance at Genentech

I started my career at the biotech pioneer Genentech. The stories I could tell!

But for the purposes of this write-up, the main one is that I learned how to work with subject-matter experts (doctors, pharmacists, research scientists) who were not software people. I learned how I could use my hacking skills (then still pretty raw) to 10x their productivity, and that was just straight-up awesome.

Genentech is also where I learned how to do specs, and how to write code that other people were going to have to use and maintain, and (not enough) how to navigate the egos in a corporate environment. I got pretty good at Oracle, very good at a quite narrow area of Drug Safety, and hungry to hack Perl.

Tech: Oracle and the million things you need to survive it.

Greenhead Green Head