David Frost
Software engineer building platforms and distributed systems, increasingly focused on AI: both what I build and how I build.
Now
I'm building Retrofolio, a portfolio backtester born out of an interest in portfolio theory and historical asset allocation. At Capital One I work on the platforms and distributed systems behind the web and mobile apps, and increasingly on AI: building AI-assisted developer tooling and using it day to day.
Writing
What Actually Drives Claude Code's Cache Bill ·
Sentry earned its keep before I closed the terminal ·
Streamlining Multi-Agent Development ·
CloudFront Continuous Deployment: Sharp Edges and When to Use It ·
Projects
Retrofolio: a portfolio backtester with a Next.js frontend and a FastAPI backend. Long-running backtests run on a Celery and Redis task pipeline. Postgres for persistence, the whole seven-service stack on a single Compute Engine VM behind Cloudflare, with Terraform and GitHub Actions driving infra and deploys.
Smart Lamp: one physical device behind four full-stack interfaces. An embedded controller on a Raspberry Pi (MQTT, Bluetooth) for real-time control, a Django dashboard with live WebSocket updates, a native iOS app in Swift, and Ansible for provisioning. Range from hardware to phone.
dhfrost.com: yes, this one. Astro and Tailwind on Cloudflare Pages, with the surrounding Cloudflare config codified in OpenTofu. Site and infra both ship through CI/CD: preview on PR, deploy on merge.