Ben Frost

I am a software engineer. Most of my client work happens at Iceni Web, building and maintaining sites for small businesses along with the integrations behind them, and I am part way through a Master of Science in Computer Science. The projects on this site are the other half: things I am building to learn something I did not already know how to do.

I came to software from engineering rather than the other way round. My degree is a Bachelor of Engineering Technology in Mechanical, and the piece of work I am still most pleased with is from that period: an orthopaedic device called the RoJuster, which I helped design and prototype as a student using 3D printing and CAD. It went into production and is in clinical use. Nothing I have shipped since has quite that quality of being a physical object in a theatre somewhere.

Then I spent four years as a Customs Officer, applying customs and immigration regulation to goods, documentation and people at the border. The job was largely about spotting risk indicators, inconsistencies and incomplete paperwork, and escalating them properly instead of letting them through. I did not expect that to be the most transferable thing on my CV, and it is: almost every entry in the devlog here is a check that reported clean when it should not have.

Alongside all of that I ran Garage Dreams, a car site, from November 2016 to April 2024. The idea was buyer's guides with actual substance in them, so I went through every forum, review and video I could find and wrote guides that ran to twenty, thirty, sometimes forty thousand words, with a YouTube channel alongside. At its peak it was doing two to three thousand readers a day, which for something that narrow I was happy with.

Search changes and then AI whittled the traffic down and eventually it was not worth continuing, which turned out to be a good thing. Making the videos meant 3D animation and simulation, which meant learning Python to script Blender, and somewhere in there I remembered that I liked building things more than writing about cars.

What I kept from it is the habit of writing everything down. Every project here has a devlog attached, and most entries are something I got wrong: a prop that built clean and did nothing, a form that reported success while discarding the message, a constant I rescaled using a number I had remembered instead of read. Those are more useful than the parts that worked first time, and considerably more common. The rule I try to hold to is that a conclusion only holding in a log file is not finished. If I claim a number here it should be traceable to something I measured, and where it is not, I would rather say so.

The field notes are the other half: short, checkable things I keep running into on real business websites, written so you can go and check your own in a couple of minutes. If you want the full record instead, employment, education and the rest, that is on my CV.