About John Fawcett
I've been finding out whether code actually works since 1971.
I'm John Fawcett — a systems engineer with fifty years of shipped work and a single stubborn habit: I don't trust a claim I can't prove. It's the thing clients are really hiring when they bring me in.
Two people: the software and the radios.
Co-founder · CEO · software
Fifty years of shipped systems — Boeing, Sierra On-Line, EA, Wizards of the Coast, Microsoft. Wrote the FrogNet software end to end: the fabric, the semantic codec, the wire protocol, the adaptive media stack, the floating database, the elections.
Co-founder · VP of Engineering · hardware & RF
The hardware and the radios. Dan owns FrogNet's physical layer — the antennas, the long-range radios, the field nodes — and proves it where it counts: he ran the April 17 closed-loop demo coast to coast and drove a 900 MHz mesh node through Queens without a dropped link. He has also challenged the design at every turn and made it far better than it was. It takes both of us.
The discipline
Prove, don't assert.
At fifteen I got my hands on a DEC-10 — a PDP-10, one of the first interactive mainframes ever built. I found Monitor mode, and I found out that the machine will answer "does it work?" right now, if you ask it correctly. That changed how I think.
I don't tell a client something works because I'm confident. I show them a test that fails on the old code and passes on the new one. Confidence is what you have right before you're wrong. A passing oracle against the real system is the only thing I'll stand behind — and it's the standard I hold my own work to before it ever reaches you.
An engineer asserting confidently from a stale reference is more dangerous than a slow one who reads the source.
It started with a question I couldn't answer.
My wife Julie asked whether her mother, Donna, could watch our family's wedding from where she was — remotely, simply, without handing the moment to some platform that owns it. It's the kind of question that sounds easy and isn't. Every honest answer ran through somebody else's cloud, somebody else's terms, somebody else's switch to flip.
So I built the thing that should have existed: a network that forms itself between the people who want to share something, owned by them, dependent on no center. That became FrogNet. It ran in my own home for the better part of a decade before it ever crossed the internet — I dogfooded it for years before I'd say a word about it in public, because that's the only kind of claim worth making.
Fifty years of building, and nearly that long married to Julie, who has been my partner across four businesses. The work and the life aren't separate things.
From assembler to the edge
Boeing flight simulation, Sierra On-Line, Electronic Arts, Wizards of the Coast, and Microsoft — aerospace, gaming, and enterprise systems across five platform generations. The full line is on the track record.
Civil Air Patrol
Cadet Lieutenant Colonel and squadron commander out of Colorado Springs, flying search-and-rescue and teaching as a Red Cross instructor. It's where the leadership instinct and FrogNet's emergency-communications purpose both come from.
A company and a foundation, on purpose.
Fawcett Innovations LLC is the commercial side — consulting, engineering, and the work-for-hire this site is about. That's how I keep the lights on and keep building.
The FrogNet Foundation is being established to steward the project for the long term. Sovereign infrastructure that a community relies on shouldn't be something a single company can hold over them, so the technology is headed toward a structure built to keep it owned by the people who use it — not by me, and not by anyone else. The same reasoning is why the source isn't published yet: the plan →
- Entity
- Fawcett Innovations LLC
- CAGE code
- 1A5Y5
- Based
- Burien, Washington
- Steward
- The FrogNet Foundation
- Licensing
- free dev · commercial
Work with John
If that's the kind of engineer you need, let's talk.
No sales funnel. You describe the problem, I tell you honestly whether I'm the right person, and we go from there. Or just start with the books — they're free, and they're the whole idea.